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50 free Arcade Fire trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Arcade Fire trivia quiz covers the Montreal collective that turned a grief-soaked debut into one of the defining albums of the 2000s and then, to the surprise of a Grammy audience, took Album of the Year for The Suburbs. The easy questions cover the landmarks: the city, the couple at the band's core, the debut album's title and the awards. From there the quiz moves through Neon Bible and the church studio in Farnham, the Reflektor campaign, the score for Her, Everything Now, We and 2025's Pink Elephant. The harder half is for the fans who own the Us Kids Know EP: the prep school where Win Butler met Josh Deu, the on-stage break-up of 2003, the grandfather who was a bandleader and radio ham, David Bowie's guest spots, the Hunger Games anthem, the Haitian proverb on a smashed guitar and the Headspace meditation piece. Nothing here quotes a lyric; the questions are about the people, records and stories. Every answer was checked against Arcade Fire's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our indie rock and Canadian music quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arcade Fire formed in which Canadian city?
Montreal
Early members lived together in the Mile End neighbourhood, and the band later bought a church studio outside the city.
Q 02Which married couple sat at the core of Arcade Fire until their 2025 separation?
Win Butler and Régine Chassagne
Butler and Josh Deu met Chassagne, a music student, while rehearsing at McGill University.
Q 03Funeral was released in Canada in September of which year?
2004
Britain had to wait until February 2005, which is why the album turned up on best-of lists for two different years.
Q 04The Suburbs debuted at No. 1 in the US in 2010. Roughly how many copies did it sell in its first week?
156,000
It also opened at No. 1 in the UK, Ireland and Canada, and two weeks after its Grammy win it leapt from No. 52 back to No. 12.
Q 05Win Butler and co-founder Josh Deu first met as students at which New Hampshire prep school?
Phillips Exeter Academy
They later attended McGill and Concordia respectively; Deu left in 2002 but kept working on the band's visuals.
Q 06Where did the band record its self-titled 2002 EP, often called the Us Kids Know EP?
Butler's family farm in Maine
Richard Reed Parry was enlisted to help record it and joined the band soon after.
Q 07Arcade Fire's 2003 EP release show at Casa del Popolo ended how?
A member quit on stage mid-encore
Brendan Reed argued with Butler and walked; Dane Mills quit too, and Win's brother and Tim Kingsbury were brought in to replace them.
Q 08Which independent label signed Arcade Fire before their first year together was out?
Merge Records
Funeral became the label's first Billboard 200 entry and outsold Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Q 09According to Win Butler, the band's name came from what?
A story a kid told him about a fire in an arcade
He believed the tale at the time and now suspects the boy made it up.
Q 10The Butler brothers' grandfather, whose death shadowed Funeral, was which bandleader and steel guitarist?
Alvino Rey
An amateur radio operator, he inspired the band's ham-radio logo and the on-screen radio exchange during 'We Used to Wait'.
Q 11Régine Chassagne's family heritage, honoured in the Funeral song 'Haïti', is from which country?
Haiti
The band gives a dollar from every ticket to Partners in Health and its Haitian partner Kanpe.
Q 12Which rock icon joined Arcade Fire for 'Wake Up' at Fashion Rocks in 2005?
David Bowie
Bowie later sang backing vocals on the title track of Reflektor.
Q 13Which band played 'Wake Up' before every 2005-06 Vertigo Tour show and had Arcade Fire open?
U2
At the third of those shows Arcade Fire joined U2's encore for a cover of Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'.
Q 21Arcade Fire wrote 'Horn of Plenty', the national anthem of Panem, for which film?
The Hunger Games
They also contributed 'Abraham's Daughter' to the soundtrack, the first film soundtrack to top the Billboard 200 since Michael Jackson's This Is It.
Q 22Arcade Fire and their string arranger scored which 2013 Spike Jonze film, earning an Oscar nomination?
Her
'Supersymmetry', written for the film, ended up on Reflektor; the score itself was not released until 2021.
Q 23Which LCD Soundsystem frontman co-produced Reflektor?
James Murphy
Some sessions took place at his DFA Records studio in New York.
Q 14Between Funeral and Neon Bible, the band bought and converted what into a recording studio?
A defunct church
It stood in Farnham, Quebec, about 70 km from the city; they sold it in 2013 after the roof collapsed.
Q 15What was the first single officially released from Neon Bible, with proceeds going to Partners in Health?
Intervention
An iTunes error briefly leaked 'Black Wave/Bad Vibrations' at the same time.
Q 16During the band's first Saturday Night Live appearance in 2007, what did Win Butler do to his guitar?
Smashed it to pieces after a string broke
The guitar bore the Creole proverb 'sak vide pa kanpe', meaning 'an empty sack cannot stand up'.
Q 17Whose Ottawa concert did Butler and Chassagne crash in 2007 to play 'State Trooper'?
Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen is among the influences the band cites, alongside Bowie, Talking Heads and Roxy Music.
Q 18Which producer worked on Neon Bible, The Suburbs and Reflektor?
Markus Dravs
On Reflektor he shared duties with the frontman of LCD Soundsystem.
Q 19Which director filmed Arcade Fire's 2010 Madison Square Garden concert for a live YouTube broadcast?
Terry Gilliam
Spike Jonze instead made the short film Scenes from the Suburbs; Vincent Morisset directed the Neon Bible tour film Miroir Noir.
Q 20The interactive Google Chrome video for 'We Used to Wait' let viewers enter what?
The address where they grew up
Chris Milk's 'geopersonalised' film showed off HTML5; the album itself shipped with eight different covers.
Q 24How was the title Reflektor first teased in the summer of 2013?
Through mysterious street art
Images collected on Instagram pointed to 9 pm on 9/9, when a 15-second clip appeared on Spotify.
Q 25Arcade Fire's 2013 Peter Gabriel tribute contribution was a version of which 1980 single?
Games Without Frontiers
It appeared on the album And I'll Scratch Yours.
Q 26Which festival did Arcade Fire headline on 27 June 2014?
Glastonbury
Their first Australian trip had come with the Big Day Out in 2008.
Q 27Which gospel legend featured on Arcade Fire's 2017 inauguration-day single 'I Give You Power'?
Mavis Staples
Proceeds went to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Q 28'Everything Now' gave the band its first No. 1 on a Billboard chart. Which one?
Adult Alternative Songs
The album marked their move to Columbia Records after a two-album deal signed in May 2017.
Q 29Arcade Fire recorded an end-credits version of 'Baby Mine' for which 2019 Disney film?
Dumbo
The Frank Churchill and Ned Washington lullaby was released as a single that March.
Q 30In 2021 the band released the 45-minute 'Memories of the Age of Anxiety' on which platform?
The Headspace meditation app
Butler said he had written 'two or three albums' worth of material during lockdown.