Everything Now

In May 2017, Arcade Fire performed six new songs at an intimate secret show in Montreal.[7] Later that month, a Twitter account designed to look like a Russian spambot started publishing clues pertaining to the new Arcade Fire album.[8]

On May 31, the band released the lead single "Everything Now" on 12" vinyl, selling it at a merchandise stall at Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona which they headlined.[9] A day later, a mysterious live stream "Live From Death Valley" was launched[10] and the band released a music video for the song,[11] appearing to have been shot in Death Valley, California.

On June 3, anagrams of song titles were published on Twitter.[12]

On June 16, the band published the music video for "Creature Comfort" to its YouTube page. It was marketed with a Facebook post purportedly from a disgruntled "Everything Now Corp" employee railing against the band's refusal to engage in corporate promotion of its new album.[13]

Similar satirical marketing done in promotion of the album stemmed from a fictional agreement the band was in; a "360 degree agreement" proposed by Everything Now Corp, whereby the band created multiple fake online articles related to events happening within the company and band. These include but are not limited to the band providing a "premature premature evaluation" of Everything Now days before release as a spoof of online music reviews, a review of a fake installment in the rhythm video game series Rock Band titled Arcade Fire: Rock Band, and fake advertisements for products based on the names of songs off of Everything Now. A collection of other promotional articles created by the band are included on the side of the fake website that lead to numerous other fake websites.[14]

The cover of the album features a digital sign of the album title beneath a digital billboard of a mountain range. The billboard sits in front of the actual mountain range that the billboard is displaying, commenting on the blurry line between a genuine object and a marketed one. The back cover features a man riding a horse, a camp fire, and an arcade machine on fire (a visual pun on the band's name.) The entire scene was shot at many points during the course of a day; two variants, labelled "Day" and "Night", were used for CD pressings. Vinyl pressings photographed the title on the cover in one of twenty different languages, and used unique photographs of the scene described above for each, including different times of day and weather patterns. The shrinkwrap for the album was printed with a radial dotted line pattern, suggesting the sky in the photograph was the printed inside of a large dome structure.

Continuing on the commercialization theme, the album booklet folded out to reveal each song and its lyrics as a flyer for a supermarket; the song durations were formatted in the same way dollar amounts are. Each song was also given its own logo in the style of a corporation.

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	6.5/10[16]
Metacritic	66/100[17]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[18]
The A.V. Club	B[19]
Chicago Tribune	[20]
Entertainment Weekly	B+[21]
The Guardian	[22]
The Independent	[23]
NME	[24]
Pitchfork	5.6/10[25]
Q	[26]
Rolling Stone	[27]

At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, Everything Now received an average score of 66 based on 39 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[17] Reviews were polarized, with some praising it as one of the year's best and others stating that it was a serious misstep for the band.

Jeremy Winograd of Slant Magazine claimed that, "The result is by far Arcade Fire's most upbeat and easily digestible album to date."[28] Barry Nicolson of NME wrote that "The Canadian art-rockers are bigger, bolder and more fearful of the future than ever" rating it five stars out of five,[24] while Will Hermes of Rolling Stone praised the album for its lyrical content, writing that it is "treacherous territory, but the band navigates it bravely, especially when it turns the critical lens on itself."[27]

In a mixed review for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis wrote that the "desire to experiment musically isn't enough to make Everything Now a bad album – there are songs worth hearing and genuinely thrilling music here – but rather a flawed one."[22] Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that "The title song finds a breezy balance between earnestness and exhilaration. Elsewhere, that balance falters, and Everything Now becomes a slighter album than its predecessors."[29] Equally negative, Brendan Frank of Pretty Much Amazing wrote that "For the first time in their career, Arcade Fire haven’t made a record; they've manufactured one."[30] Jeremy Larson of Pitchfork wrote that "Conceptually, the songs don't transcend their social critique, they succumb to it."[25] Robert Christgau wrote in 2018 that he had only "laid off" the album because he currently doesn't "feel obliged to nail down every possible Honorable Mention" and mused it might deserve a one-star honorable mention, " a worthy effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well like",[31] but added, "I don't consider it my obligation to history to make that call."[32]

Everything Now debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with 100,000 album-equivalent units, of which 94,000 were pure album sales.[35] It is Arcade Fire's third US number-one album.[35]

All tracks are written by Arcade Fire.

Credits adapted from liner notes[4] and Tidal.[37]