Arcade Fire's last live show was in February of 2020, but this weekend saw the band (well, some of them) play live again, and they chose to make their grand return at a Las Vegas crypto gala where it seems like nobody was paying attention whatsoever to the music.
The band — really just Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, though it looks like there were maybe one or two other people up there — performed at Galaverse, an event put on by a company called Gala Games that describes itself as the "leaders in play-to-earn, blockchain, and NFT gaming." Dope!
A press release for the party described it as "an immersive event for the community to celebrate the Gala Games metaverse" and that it drew "more than 500 attendees from around the world." Arcade Fire-lite performed alongside people like Steve Aoki, Maroon 5, Billy Idol, Kings of Leon, Snoop Dogg and Alice Cooper.
Footage from the show is actually a little bleak — not super surprising, given that this is an event celebrating the metaverse — with Butler and Chassagne playing a sparse, electronics-heavy setup to a very distracted audience.
Butler actually addressed the weirdness of the whole thing right before they started playing "My Body is a Cage," saying to the crowd: "You know that dream that you have where you're, like, in Las Vegas and your band's not there and you're about to sing, and then you turn around and there's a bunch of people eating dinner? Yeah, it's a fucked up dream."
Last year, Butler said that Arcade Fire have written "two or three" albums during the pandemic. Let's hope to god there are no NFT tie-ins or metaverse avatars or whatever involved, though it seems depressingly likely that there will be. The band's last record was 2017's Everything Now.
Check out the footage below.
The band — really just Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, though it looks like there were maybe one or two other people up there — performed at Galaverse, an event put on by a company called Gala Games that describes itself as the "leaders in play-to-earn, blockchain, and NFT gaming." Dope!
A press release for the party described it as "an immersive event for the community to celebrate the Gala Games metaverse" and that it drew "more than 500 attendees from around the world." Arcade Fire-lite performed alongside people like Steve Aoki, Maroon 5, Billy Idol, Kings of Leon, Snoop Dogg and Alice Cooper.
Footage from the show is actually a little bleak — not super surprising, given that this is an event celebrating the metaverse — with Butler and Chassagne playing a sparse, electronics-heavy setup to a very distracted audience.
Butler actually addressed the weirdness of the whole thing right before they started playing "My Body is a Cage," saying to the crowd: "You know that dream that you have where you're, like, in Las Vegas and your band's not there and you're about to sing, and then you turn around and there's a bunch of people eating dinner? Yeah, it's a fucked up dream."
Last year, Butler said that Arcade Fire have written "two or three" albums during the pandemic. Let's hope to god there are no NFT tie-ins or metaverse avatars or whatever involved, though it seems depressingly likely that there will be. The band's last record was 2017's Everything Now.
Check out the footage below.
