The room › Artists › Arcade Fire

Where to start with Arcade Fire

Start with Intervention — Neon Bible, 2007. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 21 Arcade Fire tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 21 Arcade Fire tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 21 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The collection leans hard on one record: 11 of the 21 tracks come from Neon Bible alone.

The years need a caveat: 21 of 21 dated tracks land in the 2000s and come from 2 records, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.

Every track is filed under indie rock; nothing here crosses into another genre.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Intervention — Neon Bible, 2007. Of the 21 Arcade Fire tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the ambient end

In the Backseat — Funeral, 2004. The lowest energy reading of any Arcade Fire track in the room (47 out of 100). This is as far towards ambient as the collection goes.

If you want the driving end

Black Mirror — Neon Bible, 2007. The highest energy reading here, at 75 out of 100 — a 28-point swing across the collection towards driving.

Where Arcade Fire sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Arcade Fire's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Arcade Fire track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Arcade Fire's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with Neutral Milk Hotel — indie rock, 23 tracks
• Where to start with The Walkmen — indie rock, 25 tracks
• Where to start with Grizzly Bear — indie rock, 67 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Arcade Fire as a group, from Montréal, Canada and formed in 2001. Its contributors tag the artist rock, synthpop, pop, alternative rock and canadian. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Arcade Fire tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 21, across 2 albums. 21 of them carry a date, running from 2004 to 2007. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 21 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 21 of these 21 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.