Arcade Fire Trivia
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48 free Arcade Fire trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 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 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arcade Fire formed in which Canadian city?
Montreal
Montreal adopted its Texas-raised frontman for good: Win Butler became a Canadian citizen in 2019, saying he had lived in the city for half his life.
Q 02Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs draws on the Butler brothers' childhood on the edge of which Texas city?
Houston
Houston: the family moved from a small California mountain town to its planned suburb The Woodlands, which Win Butler remembered as 'a pretty big culture shock'.
Q 03The cover of Arcade Fire's Reflektor shows a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice by which artist?
Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin's doomed lovers suit an album steeped in the Orpheus myth, which the band also drew from the 1959 film Black Orpheus.
Q 04In 2011 The Suburbs beat Eminem's Recovery to win Arcade Fire which Grammy?
Album of the Year
Album of the Year, handed over by Barbra Streisand, came on a night when The Suburbs lost the Best Alternative Music Album category to The Black Keys.
Q 05Win Butler and co-founder Josh Deu first met as students at which New Hampshire prep school?
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy took Butler from Texas at fifteen; when his schoolfriend Deu later left for college in Canada, Butler followed him north, and the band began there.
Q 06Where did Arcade Fire record their self-titled debut EP in the summer of 2002?
Butler's family farm in Maine
Butler's family farm in Maine was free studio space: his parents had just moved there for his father's job at a land conservatory, and the EP was sold at shows the next year.
Q 07Win Butler of Arcade Fire was named MVP of a 2016 celebrity all-star game in which sport?
Basketball
Basketball: he helped Team Canada win the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, then had his MVP interview cut short by ESPN when he started praising Canadian health care.
Q 08Which independent label signed Arcade Fire and released their debut album, Funeral?
Merge Records
Merge Records was so small that it could not cover the band's hotel bills on tour, yet Funeral became the first album in its history to reach the Billboard 200.
Q 09Win Butler says the name Arcade Fire came from what?
A story he heard as a child
A story he heard as a child, about an arcade that burned down with the kids inside: Butler says he believed it then, and now suspects the boy who told it made it up.
Q 10Alvino Rey, the Butler brothers' swing-bandleader grandfather, was a pioneer of which instrument?
The pedal steel guitar
The pedal steel guitar, which Rolling Stone says he 'all but invented'. He died at 95 while Arcade Fire were making their debut album, and its liner notes are dedicated to him.
Q 11Arcade Fire's Régine Chassagne is the daughter of immigrants who fled a 1960s dictatorship in which country?
Haiti
Haiti, then ruled by 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, is the country her parents escaped; she sings about the relatives they lost on the band's debut, and helped found the aid group Kanpe after the 2010 earthquake.
Q 12Which rock icon joined Arcade Fire for 'Wake Up' at Fashion Rocks in 2005?
David Bowie
David Bowie was already their loudest fan: he told Rolling Stone he had bought 'a huge stack' of their debut CD to give to friends, and in 2013 he sang backing vocals on 'Reflektor'.
Q 13Which band walked on stage to Arcade Fire's 'Wake Up' at every show of its 2005-06 world tour?
U2
Q 21Arcade Fire wrote 'Horn of Plenty', the national anthem of a fascist state, for which film?
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games needed an anthem for its Capitol; Win Butler said they wrote it as 'the Capitol's idea of itself', and composer James Newton Howard wove it through the film's score.
Q 22Arcade Fire and their string arranger scored which 2013 Spike Jonze film, earning an Oscar nomination?
Her
Her closes with 'Supersymmetry', a song the band wrote for the film and then reworked as the final track of their own album Reflektor.
Q 23Which New York frontman co-produced Arcade Fire's Reflektor?
James Murphy
U2 made it their walk-on music and booked the band to open three Canadian dates; in 2010 the NFL played the song during the Super Bowl, with its fee going to the band's chosen charity.
Q 14Between their first two albums, Arcade Fire bought what kind of building to convert into a recording studio?
A defunct church
A defunct church in Farnham, Quebec, became the studio for Neon Bible; in 2013 the band put it up for sale with a tweet, 'Anybody want to buy a church?', because it needed a new roof.
Q 15Which Neon Bible song did Arcade Fire release early, in December 2006, as a charity download?
Intervention
Intervention went on sale for charity that Boxing Day, but the band uploaded the wrong file at first and briefly released the album's next track instead.
Q 16What did Win Butler do to his acoustic guitar on Arcade Fire's first Saturday Night Live appearance?
Smashed it to pieces
Smashed it to pieces at the end of the first song; moments before the second, host Rainn Wilson asked him in a deadpan voice what had happened to his guitar.
Q 17Whose 2007 Ottawa concert did Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Régine Chassagne join as surprise guests to play 'State Trooper'?
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen repaid the visit in the same encore by playing Arcade Fire's own 'Keep the Car Running' with them, the only time he played either song on that tour.
Q 18Which producer worked on Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, The Suburbs and Reflektor?
Markus Dravs
Markus Dravs began as an engineer and mixer on Neon Bible and rose to co-producer on the next two albums; his other clients include Coldplay and Mumford & Sons.
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 20Arcade Fire's interactive Chrome video for 'We Used to Wait' asked each viewer to type in what?
Their childhood address
Their childhood address: the film then pulled pictures of that home and its streets from Google Maps and Street View, so every viewer watched a different video.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem brought the dance floor with him: his background in electronic dance music runs through the sprawling double album.
Q 24How did Arcade Fire first tease the title of their album Reflektor in the summer of 2013?
Through mysterious street art
Through mysterious street art: the logo was stencilled on walls from London to Sydney, and Win Butler sent a handwritten apology after a writer complained that the Austin shop where his wife works had been sprayed.
Q 25Arcade Fire's 2013 Peter Gabriel tribute contribution was a version of which 1980 single?
Games Without Frontiers
Games Without Frontiers was a favour returned late: Gabriel had covered their 'My Body Is a Cage' in 2010 and admitted the band's reply looked 'questionable'; it arrived three years later.
Q 26Which British festival did Arcade Fire headline in June 2014?
Glastonbury
Glastonbury was a place Win Butler had called 'a nightmare' and 'a mudpit' after playing there in 2007; seven years on, the band came back to top the bill on its Pyramid Stage.
Q 27Which gospel legend sang on Arcade Fire's 'I Give You Power', released on the eve of Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration?
Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples trades the warning 'I can take it all away' with Win Butler on the track, the band's first new recording in four years; its proceeds went to the ACLU.
Q 28The single 'Everything Now' gave Arcade Fire their first No. 1 song on which Billboard chart?
Adult Alternative Songs
Adult Alternative Songs, a radio airplay chart, gave them a first chart-topping song sixteen years into their career, long after two of their albums had reached No. 1.
Q 29Arcade Fire recorded an end-credits version of 'Baby Mine' for which 2019 Disney film?
Dumbo
Dumbo is where the song began: in the 1941 original it is the lullaby sung as Dumbo's caged mother cradles him with her trunk, and Tim Burton's remake kept the band's version for the end credits.
Q 30In 2021 Arcade Fire released the 45-minute 'Memories of the Age of Anxiety' on which platform?
The Headspace meditation app
The Headspace meditation app promised 'meditative vibes to help you focus'; the piece came out of a lockdown in which Win Butler said new music was flowing.