Maybe rock isn’t dead. Perhaps it’s just gone underground and it’s hiding out as it gets leaner: more artful, more interesting. It can’t hide much longer, particularly if we’re talking about the Arcade Fire.

Few rock—and I use that term loosely—acts in recent memory have earned widespread critical praise and escalating surge from the ghetto of indie rock to mainstream acknowledgement and success like Arcade Fire. Of course, there’s few acts that deserved it like they do. David Bowie is one their biggest fans and they’ve been on the cover of Canada’s Time magazine, which heralded them the nation’s most intriguing band.

The bottom line: Husband and wife Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, along with Win’s brother William Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, Sarah Neufeld and Jeremy Gara are poised to melt into the global cognition as Arcade Fire.

This Montreal collective seemingly burst into the indie consciousness by overhauling art rock, implementing wide instrumentation and idiosyncratically smattering chamber music and new wave rock with eloquent, deeply personal pop. In doing so, Arcade Fire’s music proved a quality often rare: timelessness. The simplistic divide would have it that Winn Butler writes and sings most of the songs while Chassagne crafts and plots the complex, multi-instrumental arrangements, but ultimately Arcade Fire is a complete band with everyone adding to the final creation.

Their debut release on Merge Records, 2004’s Funeral, garnered across-the-board raving wows in the then burgeoning blogosphere of music sites, highlighted by a 9.7 review from prime tastemaker and music news source Pitchfork.com. By the end 2004, Funeral rated on every best of list and the band’s limited tour sold out every date.

By 2005, the record was out across the world and the band’s success in North America was bested in England. They appeared alongside aforementioned fan Bowie on the international broadcast of Fashion Rocks, not only playing “Life on Mars” and “Five Years” but also having his thin whiteness taking vocal duties on the band’s “Wake Up.” More sold-out tours followed.

While 2006 seemed quieter, the band was writing and arranging new material while shuttling between Quebec, New York, Budapest and London to record it. Major labels came calling but big money offers were eschewed when the band chose to stay with the hip North Carolina imprint Merge.

The initial publicity to launch the album was a shroud of secrecy and left-of-center buzzmakings, like a cryptic Web site, www.neonbible.com, that prompted a toll free phone number (866-NEON BIBLE) that, when dialed, played selected tracks from the album. A string of multiple night sold-out shows in small venues both at home in Montreal and in New York were capped by a brilliant two-song turn on Saturday Night Live two weeks ago.

The band produced the record themselves but called up famed producer Bob Johnston—whose credits include both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen’s finest albums—to act as their counsel and mentor. It would appear that Johnston’s guidance, as small as it might have been, added some magic.

Neon Bible is nothing short of marvelous. It takes the band’s baroque orch pop sprawl and spreads it over a wider canvas with a framework of scrupulously played songs with hypnotic and detailed arrangements. Thematically, Neon Bible delves into populism, personal failure, existentialism, religion and vast societal pressures.

The haunting opener “Black Mirror” serves to unravel a mysterious, archaic oracle as Butler calls out in a tortured vox, switching between English and French, over a driving beat. “Intervention” is a bombastic and beautiful epic led by Chassagne on a gigantic pipe organ, while Butler makes like a post-modern Springsteen, anthemic but with consciousness. In the couplet “Who’s gonna throw the very first stone?/Who’s going to reset the bone?” Butler lays plain a link between wrongdoing and redemption.

“Antichrist Televison Blues” at first listen appears a folky dash of acoustic rock but boils over into a protest anthem embroiled in post-9/11 paranoia, religious fervor and media-crippled delusion. A revamped version of “No Cars Go” returns from the band’s self-titled EP, remaking the stripped, elegiac song with big, elegant orchestration. The dirgey closer, “My Body Is Cage,” again features the massive pipe organ and sounds like either a prayer or plea to excising worldly woes and spiritual confinement.

Whether or not the world at large actually embraces the Arcade Fire for a moment of fame is ultimately of little matter. Neon Bible bears the signs of the kind of art that is likely to stand long after fleeting fame erodes.