Arcade Fire Poke Fun at Stereogum with Fake Everything Now Review

Arcade Fire have outwitted Stereogum, posting a “premature premature evaluation” of their album Everything Now on a spoof version of the music website.

Stereoyum, complete with fake advertisements, mimics every feature on the Stereogum site, down to the “Heavy Rotation” section. The “premature premature evaluation”—spoofing the “premature evaluation” feature on Stereogum’s site—is a response to Stereogum’s article “Remember When Arcade Fire Were Good?” The piece, which was met with backlash, takes shots at the band’s latest single “Everything Now,” saying it “coasts along in a state of semi-pleasant mediocrity, a nightmare Arcade Fire parody come to life.”

The fake piece presents Stereogum as predictable and pretentious, saying, “We’re not entirely sure yet—it’s still a little early—but it seems likely that, by the time we get around to writing our actual Premature Evaluation, we will find ourselves predicting that Everything Now will eventually be evaluated as one of the best albums of the year.”

The funniest line comes at the end of the article, which predicts Everything Now will “come in just a few spots below Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy in our year-end list, probably somewhere between number 8 and number 14.” Before the publication of the spoof piece, we would have made the same guess. Now that Stereogum has been preempted, our guess is they’ll avoid validating the snark of the article by making a conscious effort not to place the album in that window of spots on their year-end list.

Check out the “premature premature evaluation” here. Everything Now is set to release this Friday, July 28, but it’s probably, like, so overrated—unless you guys are into it. In which case, so are we.