A castle in Jamaica, rented cheaply after years of emptiness and filled with beds, a piano, and recording equipment, sounds like the setup for a haunted-house movie, not a career-defining album. Yet that is exactly where Arcade Fire, the Canadian band known for anthemic indie rock, chased a dangerous new sound. On October 28, 2013, the gamble landed as Reflektor, a sprawling double album that split critics and fans while cementing the group's refusal to repeat themselves.
A trip to Haiti changes the sound
The seed was planted when singer Win Butler and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne traveled to Haiti, the homeland of Chassagne's family. Butler later said the trip changed how he saw the world and opened new cultural influences. The most audible of those was rara, a Haitian street-music tradition built on hypnotic percussion and call-and-response vocals. Suddenly Arcade Fire wanted to make people move, not just raise their fists.
From 2011 the band chased that feeling across three countries: Louisiana, Jamaica, and their home base of Montreal. In Jamaica they rented Trident, a castle built in 1979 by an eccentric local and left empty for years. The price was low, but the work was not. The group had around sixty song ideas, and Butler said fifty or sixty songs were written for the album. What started as a short album became eighteen tracks, several stretching past six minutes. The original plan was for a short album, but the sessions produced eighteen songs, each running from six to eight minutes.
Art-rock meets dance-rock
Reflektor's sound is art-rock colliding with dance-rock, a friction the band leaned into by splitting the record in two halves. Each side offers its own world. The companion 'Here Comes the Night Time II' opens the second half. Both grew from a real image: sunset in Port-au-Prince, where a city without reliable electricity rushes home before dark.
The record's intellectual scaffolding was just as ambitious. A 1959 film, Black Orpheus, shaped lyrics about alienation and death. An essay by Søren Kierkegaard, 'Two Ages', fed reflections on a self-obsessed era, the press, and disconnection. These were not typical rock-star inspirations, but Arcade Fire had never been a typical rock band. In August 2012, producer James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem joined after the group had wanted to work with him for more than six years, tightening the grooves without sanding off the weirdness. Reviewers also heard the influence of U2's Achtung Baby era and of producer James Murphy in the finished record.
The 1.6 million dollar gamble
The cost of all this ambition was staggering: 1.6 million dollars, according to the band's manager. For context, that is a fortune for a group that built its name on communal singalongs, not studio excess. The gamble extended to marketing. On September 9, 2013, the title track appeared as a limited single credited to a fictional band called The Reflektors.
The album's cover doubled down on the myth-making. It features a photograph of Auguste Rodin's sculpture Orpheus and Eurydice, shot by Joseph Coscia Jr. at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Orpheus, the musician who descends into the underworld, is a fitting symbol for a record obsessed with death, reflection, and the thin line between performance and reality.
Critics mostly embraced the risk. Reflektor earned an 80 out of 100 on Metacritic from 48 reviews. Pitchfork gave it 9.2 out of 10, and Rolling Stone's David Fricke called it the best album Arcade Fire had ever made. Not everyone danced, but everyone noticed. The record made there still rattles with the energy of a band that refused to play it safe.