Brow Beat

Dance with Regine Chassagne in Arcade Fire’s Latest Interactive Video

Regine Chassagne in the new Arcade Fire video.

Almost a year and a half after Arcade Fire released their Grammy-winning third album The Suburbs, they’ve finally come out with a video for perhaps that album’s best song, “Sprawl II.” The album’s first video was the powered-by-Google-Street-View “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive video for “We Used To Wait” which took over your desktop and sent its protagonist running towards your hometown. Now, appropriately for The Suburbs’ most danceable song, they want you to dance—or at least make a lot of herky-jerky movements.

Here’s how it works. You can watch a non-interactive version of the video below, but if you want to participate you have to grab a webcam and head to Sprawl2.com. There you can influence the movements the characters make by dragging your mouse around, and—if you’re comfortable moving more than your index finger—waving your arms around and dancing in front of the screen. True to the album’s concept, the video is about a handful of slightly zombie-like suburbanites. I know it’s early, but it seems that once again Arcade Fire want both you and those suburban folk to “Wake Up.”

Oh, and click through to watch the goofy promo they used to announce the video: