Arcade Fire’s Will Butler will release his sophomore album Generations next week via Merge Records, and has released third single “Bethlehem.”
It’s a high energy rocker that feels triumphant and grand, never relenting or backing down for even a second. With the release, Butler has shared a music video for the track directed by Adrienne Anderson.
Find the music video available to watch below, along with a little background on the track from Butler:
This song partly springs from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Like a lot of folks, I woke up after the election in 2016 mad and sad and scared and exhausted. This song is born of that emotion.
My bandmates Jenny Shore, Julie Shore, and Sara Dobbs sing the bridge, and it’s a corrective to my (appropriate?) freaking out—this isn’t the apocalypse. You’re misquoting Yeats. Get your fucking head on straight. History has not ruptured—this shit we’re in is contiguous with the shit we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time. But still, we sometimes do need an apocalyptic vision to make change. Even if it’s technically wrong. I dunno. It’s an ongoing conversation.
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