Canadian rock band Arcade Fire‘s new album, “The Suburbs,” is set for release on Aug. 3, the group’s label Merge announced today. The album’s first single, also entitled “The Suburbs” and backed with “Month of May,” will be released as a 12-inch single on May 27, and fans who preorder the album will be given a digital download of the two tracks immediately.
Arcade Fire is scheduled to perform at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago just days after the release of “The Suburbs.”
“The Suburbs” is Arcade Fire’s follow-up to “Neon Bible,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in March 2007 and has sold 421,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The band has been working on the album for more than six months with producer Markus Dravs, who also helmed “Neon Bible.” There has been speculation that Owen Pallett, the Polaris Prize-winning creative force behind Final Fantasy, has been working on the album’s arrangements. He previously arranged strings for Arcade Fire, and fueled rumors by recently cryptically posting on Twitter that he had “just completed 10 days on the best album I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on.”
(Additional reporting by Robert Thompson)