Arcade Fire's third record confirmed for 2010, 'better'

Last time we checked in with everyone's favourite husband and wife ensemble, was back in January when the Arcade Fire were playing a show for Barack Obama's staff party. (In fact we ran an exclusive gallery of photos from the set at the time.)

After a whirlwind couple of years of waving the flag for 2006's Neon Bible, the band went to ground in late 2008 to begin working on the follow up. In April this year they paused to release an excellent quasi-documentary DVD titled Miroir Noir, which covered the recording, release and rapturously received tour behind Neon Bible. As far as visual documents attempting the transient creative headspace of band life go, it rivals Radiohead's Meeting People Is Easy for its dreamlike depiction of the every day set entwined with moments of real musical catharsis. Translation: It's great, buy it.

Not much is known about the band's third record. We do know that band members spent some time in a New York studio during the year, and in a September interview with the Montreal Gazette, sometime touring violinist Marika Anthony-Shaw was quoted as saying of the next record: "It’s going to be wonderful. It’s been an amazing experience.”

The sentiment was soon followed up in October when violinist and close friend Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy) wrote on his Twitter account: 'Arcade Fire have some pretty gorgeous microphones right here. It'd be so easy to slip one into my bag'. He followed this up soon after with: 'Can't contain it. I just completed 10 days on the best album I've ever had the pleasure of working on'.

Now a rep for the band's UK label Mercury has confirmed that the album is indeed due in 2010. Speculation on the band's message board suggests that the album is due in the first half of the year, when poster wrote of the upcoming Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona:

"AF were one of the most requested (by the fans) bands for Primavera 2010, which happens in May, but apparently the band/management told Primavera that it won't happen because they're not touring until at least June."