Somewhere in the density of sweat and flashing strobes, Win Butler is a prophet, or a guy from Montreal, or a man yelling into a microphone about the smallness of things and the bigness of things and the way everything swells and sways between the two. O2 Academy Brixton is full. Not packed, but full—like the room itself has grown lungs and is breathing in the pulse of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” the piano notes tiny and twinkling at first, before the full orchestral weight crashes down like a wave that doesn’t want to let you back up. A fever dream of suburban escape, except none of us are escaping—we’re here, in it, locked in by a decade’s worth of devotion, nostalgia weaponized in the best possible way.
“Wake Up” should be obvious, should be expected, but it isn’t. You can brace yourself for that opening riff, for the choral explosion that follows, but when it hits, it still rips you apart and puts you back together. It should be overplayed, should be diluted by time, but somehow it isn’t. The crowd—our crowd—sings every word back as if they wrote them, as if they’ve just remembered something important. A thousand voices shouting into the rafters, into the night, into the spaces between past and present.
Rebellion (Lies) is a sprint, a hammering of drums, a prophesy of motion. Win prowls the stage, eyes scanning like he’s looking for something, or maybe just making sure the audience is alive. The refrain—”Every time you close your eyes”—is less a lyric, more a demand: don’t sleep, don’t slip into complacency, don’t let the world dull you. The guitars ring out like alarms. We answer them.
Somewhere near the middle of the set, Reflektor happens. Not “is played,” but happens, because this song is an event. Strobes pulse like a bad decision at 2 a.m., the bassline thumps through the ribcage, and for a few minutes, Brixton is an underground discotheque for indie-rock disciples who never fully accepted that dance music might belong to someone else. It stretches, mutates, goes places it wasn’t meant to, like a thought spiraling at 3 a.m. that you can’t quite control. Is it still the same song by the end? Does it matter?
Régine Chassagne is spinning, arms lifted like a marionette briefly freed of its strings. The way she moves isn’t dance; it’s an incantation, a flickering candle, a living, breathing exclamation mark. She sings Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) like she’s trying to find a way out of the song, but also like she knows she never really will. Neon-drenched synths burst and swirl, equal parts euphoria and trapped electricity. The crowd—our crowd, because this is communal now—lifts with her, as if the only way to defy the smallness of the world is to sing about it loudly enough.
Arcade Fire have always been too much. Too grand, too earnest, too theatrical. That’s the whole point. They don’t just play music; they hurl it at you, drench you in it, make you carry it home in your hair and your lungs and the soles of your feet. They have no interest in cool detachment or ironic distance. This is feeling, capital F, weaponized and set loose into the night.
And then it’s over. Just like that. The last note lingers in the air for a second too long, the lights snap back to their harsh, real-world brightness, and we are returned to our ordinary, non-orchestral, non-anthemic existence. Except we’re not. Not quite. The echoes stay with us, reverberating through the streets of Brixton, through the night. Maybe even longer than that.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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