“Reflektor” was the titular opening track and first single from Arcade Fire’s fourth album. It was highly anticipated after The Suburbs brought them a degree of mainstream recognition.

It features David Bowie on vocals. This introduced him to James Murphy, who he would collaborate with several times before Bowie’s death in 2016.

The seven-minute disco-influenced track opens with a sample from “Tunnels”, digitally edited by Kid Koala.

The melody is primarily based around Will Butler’s synths complemented by Colin Stetson’s brass arrangements. It also has a strong rhythm section, characteristic of Reflektor.

Win Butler explained that the lyrics were inspired by “The Present Age”, an essay by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:

This is like in 1846, and it sounds like he’s talking about modern times. He’s talking about the press and alienation, and you kind of read it and you’re like, ‘Dude, you have no idea how insane it’s gonna get.’

During a Red Bull Music lecture, Win Butler said:

The song “Reflektor” we worked on … it was one of the first things we started with James and we worked on it for about six months. It was good but it wasn’t that good. I probably have a rough mix of it somewhere. It was okay.
We were kind of not breaking through on it so we decided … we threw a party. We did this elaborate hoax where we pretended it was another band at a recording studio. It was in a loft building. We set up this fake stage, this is the lengths you have to go now. It’s insane. But we set up a fake stage and we were in the other room and my brother and Richie came out in masks and pretended to be the band and played this horrible reggae kind of thing. So everyone thought this was the show and half the people were like, “This is awful. I’m out of here.” Half the people were like, “OK I could get into…” You know. “Yeah. I could get into this.” Then we had… Then they started a conga line. We were already playing in the next room. Everyone came in, and we were already playing. We played half of Reflektor live. It was the first time playing it in front of anyone. This is before we even cut the record. Really, we were halfway done. We played it, and we were like, “OK, that’s how that goes.” The next day we… 12 musicians, live, two percussionists, sax… just cut it in a day. Threw away the six months that we had worked on the previous thing, and that’s what the song is.

Richard Reed Parry commented on Bowie’s involvement to NME:

He offered to lend us his services because he really liked the song. In fact, he basically threatened us – he was like, ‘If you don’t hurry up and mix this song, I might just steal it from you!’ So we thought, well why don’t we go one better, why don’t you sing on our version? Thankfully he obliged, and we were really happy about that.