Da Suburbs

Forget Taking Penicillin, you bastards.

From NPR Music:

Arcade Fire front man Win Butler began forming the ideas behind The Suburbs in 2009, after receiving a letter from an old friend from his boyhood home outside of Houston, Texas. "He sent us a picture of him with his daughter on his shoulders at the mall around the corner from where we lived," says Butler. "And the combination of seeing this familiar place and seeing my friend with his child brought back a lot of feeling from that time. I found myself trying to remember the town that we grew up in and trying to retrace as much as I could remember."

The search through faded memories led Butler and the rest of Arcade Fire back to the studio, where they laid down The Suburbs' opening and title track. Like much of the album, it's a song that swaggers almost playfully while detailing the boredom and terror of a life that may ultimately be meaningless. "The kids want to be so hard," sings Butler. "But in my dreams we're still screaming / And running through the yard / When all of the walls that they built in the '70s finally fall / Meant nothing at all / It meant nothing."