Live Music: Arcade Fire at Grand Prospect Hall, Brooklyn

Last night we trekked out to Park Slope for a super hyped, super intimate, free Arcade Fire show. No stranger to secret shows, the band organized the event with Apple Music and Chemistry (“its like the redbull of…. whatever the fuck”) giving away tickets earlier this week, through a lottery system.

Taking place at Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall, a 125-year-old venue usually used for Bar Mitzvah’s and weddings, it was a fitting celebration of their new album Everything Now which was released today. The evening was a non-stop sweat filled dance party, tailored perfectly to die hard Arcade Fire fans. To make the evening totally immersive and that much more intimate, the band opted to play in the middle of the hall surrounded by their fans on the floor and the balconies above, instead of on the stage, where they instead had their soundboard.

The band took to the square stage after an announcer with the longest dreadlocks of life highlighted their many achievements including of course their many Grammy, Mercury, and Juno Award wins (how very Canadian of them), and launched right into the album’s title track “Everything Now.” While it’s one of their newest tracks, the crowd seemed receptive to it, however, we worried for a moment they’d only play their new album, which of course we had only heard four out of thirteen tracks.

But being one of the coolest, most beloved indie bands in the world means you know how to give fans exactly what they want, and as such the set consisted of some of their biggest tracks from all five studio albums.

Frontman Win Butler made sure to introduce each track at times with somewhat of a political agenda. Before playing “We Exist” off 2013’s Reflector, Win said, “trans people are not a disturbance” a nod to the lyrics of the song which reference equality and self-empowerment, continuing to say “I wish this shit was a joke, but we have a lot of work to do.”

He also made a point of mentioning how much the band was affected by David Bowie’s passing last year, sending love to him and his family, performing “Reflektor” a little later in the set which feature his vocals.

After just shy of two hours, the band and the entire crowd was drenched in sweat from dancing and waving their hands back and forth. Win thanked everyone for supporting them and buying their albums for all these years, going on to say, “sorry it took us so long to make this album, but it’s the only way we know how to do it.”

Check out some photos from the show below and catch the live stream in case you missed it now on Apple Music.