Arcade Fire returns, and their latest single, “Year of the Snake,” is a massive takedown of everything we know. Lifted from their forthcoming seventh studio album, “Pink Elephant,” to be released by May 9, 2025, the track whispers a change.
Penned by the band’s creative nucleus Régine Chassagne and Win Butler and co-produced by the legendary Daniel Lanois, “Year of the Snake” is a slow-building, serpentine marriage of existential dread and hard-won hope. In reference to the Chinese Zodiac’s 2025 “Year of the Snake,” the title is a metaphor for rebirth and shedding the past. That sentiment pulses through the track like a heartbeat, trying to find its rhythm in an off-kilter world.
“Year of the Snake” is a hazy but focused song infused with classic Arcade Fire emotional weight as it explores fresh aural textures. In an unexpected turn, Win Butler plays drums for the first time, and there’s almost an anticlimactic brutishness in the choice, a kind of hands-on rebirth that suits the song’s themes.
The track’s stacked instrumentation winds and coils never quite rest. It’s danceable in that existential way Arcade Fire does best somewhere between a slow realization and a spiritual catharsis and everything in between. The production has an air of intimacy and immensity, as if you’re hearing a monologue reverberating across a canyon.
The music video, directed by David Wilson and Mark Prendergast, further enhances the track’s contemplative mood. We see Win and Régine on a surreal road trip from the brazen boisterousness of Mardi Gras in New Orleans to the sun-dappled rodeos of Houston. It’s a visual odyssey that is deeply personal and universally symbolic, a meditation on the band’s perennial theme of finding oneself in a fractured world. “Year of the Snake” is a sliver of the band’s latest transformation. And if this is only the start, this “Pink Elephant” is on course to be Arcade Fire’s most introspective, extremely adventurous endeavor yet.
Stream on Spotify:
Follow Arcade Fire on Spotify
