James Murphy says producing the new Arcade Fire album was “way better” than he expected

Former LCD Soundsystem frontman and main source of Arcade Fire new album news, James Murphy has – again – spoken some more about producing the record from the Canadian band, explaining that it was “way better” than he had expected.

“Everyone was amazingly respectful,” says Murphy of the Quebec collective who announced via a reply to a fan’s tweet that their much anticipated fourth album is set to drop 29 October.

Surprisingly, the musician, DJ, and co-founder of record label DFA Records was completely unaware of the big news.

“I didn’t even know that’s what they did,” Murphy told Billboard. “When you work on a record you don’t know any of the things around it. So when it comes out I’ll just be like, ‘The Arcade Fire record’s out — oh, right!’ It’s been the food I eat and the air I breathe for a long time now. That happens with my own records. I am officially done with it, we’ve just been passing things back and forth making choices on mixes”

As far as the creative direction of the record goes, Murphy didn’t spill the beans on whether the new project would be a concept album like their 2010 album, The Suburbs. “I dealt with the holistic record in a non-verbal way. We don’t talk about where the songs come from unless somebody says, ‘What I’m going for is more this…’ That’s all I got into. I’m not trying to conduct an opera, or a rock opera — a ‘ropera” in this case.”

Murphy continued to tell Billboard about his recording schedule with the seven-plus group and how his production duties were spent in the band’s home town of Montreal as well as New York. He said the experience was ”way better than I expected it to be. Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who’s going to be easy to get along with and who’s going to be difficult. So I wasn’t sure what was going to be the case, since there’s a lot of them. I figured, they’re all super talented, do they need another dude there with his opinions? It turned out it was really nice, and everyone was amazingly respectful of one another.”