Released August 1, 2010 Genre Baroque pop
indie rock | Format 7"
digital download Label Rough Trade
Merge | |
Length 5:02 (album version)
3:28 (radio edit) Writer(s) Arcade Fire (William Butler, Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, Jeremy Gara, Tim Kingsbury, Richard Reed Parry) | ||
"We Used to Wait" is the first UK single from Arcade Fire's third album The Suburbs, following "Ready to Start", which was the first US single. It was released on August 1, 2010 in the UK.
Contents
The Wilderness Downtown
The song is also part of the experimental project The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive music video to tout the HTML 5 strengths of the Google Chrome web browser. It figures prominently in the location-based audiovisual web experience and the name of the project is taken from a line in the song.
Reception
Rolling Stone named it the 5th best song of 2010. It also named its interactive music video 'thewildernessdowntown.com' one of the best music videos of 2010.
In February 2011, music video blog Yes, We've Got a Video! ranked the project at number 2 in their top 30 videos of 2010. The project was praised as a "beautiful experiment that has significantly pushed the boundaries of the music video by introducing the factor of interactivity."
In July 2011, the music video was named one of "The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos" by TIME Magazine.
Covers
On 20 October 2010, Mark Ronson and Business Intl, featuring Alex Greenwald on both vocals and the mandolin, and Rose Dougall on backing vocals, covered the song on Jo Whiley’s BBC Radio 1 show. The Drums also covered this song.