Arc was released on 14 January 2013, and debuted at number 5 on the UK album chart. Higgs noted that in comparison to the complexity of the songs on Man Alive, the songwriting on Arc was intended to be a simpler distillation of his ideas and a more direct expression of his emotion. In an interview with the New Statesman, he explained that the new album was "far more open. It's far less cluttered and far less difficult to work out what's going on or what I'm saying. I think we tried to straighten it out and make it less distracting and more solid and strong. There are fewer places to hide I think, so that's the main thing. It's clear now who's doing what. It took us a long time to be confident enough to do that."[22]
The album was hailed as "another tour de force"[23] by The Observer, although The Guardian was more sparing with praise - "Jerky opener Cough Cough may showcase them at their most self-consciously wacky, but The Peaks is at the opposite end of the spectrum, attempting the kind of stadium melancholia beloved of Elbow or Coldplay. Inevitably, Arc lacks coherence; it's the sound of a band working out who they want to be. Hopefully that'll be the band that combines both modes seamlessly, as they do on Kemosabe and Armourland, a sleek piece of robo-pop that links social breakdown with the emotional barriers we all put up."[24] In the Independent on Sunday.
New Musical Express regarded the album as "a leaner, more relatable beast than its predecessor... The self-conscious straining to be regarded as innovators and iconoclasts that occasionally muddled their debut is absent here: this is a record less bothered about surface than it is about feeling... Slowly but surely, they are progressing towards something extraordinary." The review also called attention to the album's themes of technology and human response: "Pop's young futurists have written an album about how terrifying the future is. The intertwined themes of technology and disconnection are prevalent through Arc."[25]
A third single from Arc - "Duet" - was released on 25 March 2013 on 7" vinyl.[26]
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