James Murphy on ‘Better Than Expected’ Arcade Fire Experience

James Murphy has been lending his talents to Arcade Fire this year in preparation for the band’s next album which will be released this fall. The experience of working with the seven-member outfit and producing tracks for the LP has been pleasant for the former LCD Soundsystem frontman, reports Billboard. 

“Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who’s going to be easy to get along with and who’s going to be difficult. So I wasn’t sure what was going to be the case, since there’s a lot of them,” Murphy says. “I figured, they’re all super talented, do they need another dude there with his opinions? It turned out it was really nice, and everyone was amazingly respectful of one another.”

The 10 Most Anticipated Albums of 2013: The Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire has been dividing time working on the album between the band’s homebase of Montreal and Murphy’s DFA Records studio in New York, and announced on Twitter that the project is set for release on October 29th. Murphy was unaware of that detail.

“When you work on a record you don’t know any of the things around it. So when it comes out I’ll just be like, ‘The Arcade Fire record’s out — oh, right!’ It’s been the food I eat and the air I breathe for a long time now,” he said.

Few details have been released about the highly-anticipated follow-up to 2010’s The Suburbs, and Murphy can’t confirm the direction it’s going to take, but has teased that the new album is “epic.”