Faculty of Arts & Science

Criticism and Curatorial Practice

Talia Veneruz

Cul-de-sacs and Capitalism: How Arcade Fire’s, The Suburbs, Addresses Neoliberal Suburbanization’s Structure of Feeling

Emerging in 2010, Arcade Fire’s third studio album, The Suburbs, uses its titular motifs of sprawling identical houses, dead shopping malls, and pavement-pounding bike rides to explore the effects of neoliberal capitalism on mental health. Throughout 16 meditative tracks composed by Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury and Jeremy Gara, The Suburbs touches on suburbanization’s construction of a sick society. In referencing ideas of authority and surveillance, the rapid rise of technology and the American Dream, the album becomes a framework for understanding the dire need for structural accountability to address the root of the mental health crisis.

“Coming out in the OCADU Journal of Visual and Critical Studies, May, 2026.”