A debut made in the middle of real mourning, played like the only cure on offer. Arcade Fire tracked most of Funeral across a single week of August 2003 at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal, finished it later that year, and kept the whole thing on analogue tape. Merge Records released it on September 14, 2004.

Several people in the band lost family members while the record was being made, and the songs stay with that: death, change, the end of childhood. The first half runs as one piece, the 'Neighborhood' suite, set in a town knocked out by a winter power failure and drawn from the band's own memory of the 1998 North American ice storm. The suite gives the album its weather: dark houses, deep snow, children tunnelling between them.

Baroque pop is the tag it carries, and the scale fits. These are grief songs arranged for a crowd rather than for headphones, and the analogue recording leaves the edges rough enough to match the material. The band had no history to lean on here, no audience to protect, and it plays that way. Funeral suits anyone who wants mourning loud and communal instead of hushed, and anyone who has ever gone through a long winter in a house with the power out.