It took only 21 years, but Merge Records finally accomplished something label co-founder Laura Ballance never thought was possible: A No. 1 record on the U.S. pop charts. Yet after a modest, do-it-yourself beginning in the late '80s in Chapel Hill, N.C. -- running the label while performing to nearly empty clubs with her band Superchunk -- Ballance is definitely not one who's going to gloat.

"The whole chart thing is kind of like sports," she said Wednesday. "The need to have a ranking is kind of meaningless. I’m more like, ‘It did good? That’s great.’ "

The third effort from orchestral pop outfit the Arcade Fire sold 156,000 copies to debut at No. 1 on Billboard's pop chart, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The figure builds upon the start of the band's last effort, 2007's "Neon Bible," which bowed at No. 2 with 92,000 sold. At a time when the close of each year brings another double-digit decline in CD sales, the Arcade Fire is one of the rare bands that continues to expand its audience, and is doing so with complex and thematic albums. 

Yet the Arcade Fire is also a band that tours rarely, and has little interest in self-promotion. For instance, Merge and the band are selling a download of "The Suburbs," bundling the digital release with an interactive digital picture book. Artwork and lyrics were synchronized to each individual song, and clicking on the images will take users to links connected to each track, be it the Wikipedia pages of suburban Texas towns or YouTube music videos. Users can learn, for instance, which Arcade Fire song was influenced by Foreigner.  

With labels and artists trying to find inventive ways to bolster album sales, such an unique approach to packaging a digital album would seem tailor-made for a marketing campaign. Merge, however, made zero attempt to promote the innovation outside its website. 

"Nobody knew about it," Ballance admits."The band are fans of doing things under the radar and letting people discover it. We did not promote it as a feature. I think it’s cool. It’s even awesome for a little karaoke."

But "The Suburbs" certainly raked in the digital sales. Although SoundScan doesn't break down digital sales by retailer, a whopping 97,000 digital copies of "The Suburbs" were purchased. Many will certainly draw the same conclusion as Billboard, noting that "The Suburbs" surely benefited from a week-long promotion at Amazon.com, which sold the album for $3.99. Such low-priced offers are nothing new for Amazon, and acts as big as U2 have been sold by the online retailer at that price point. 

"Unfortunately, that’s not up to us," Ballance said of Amazon's decision to lowball the price of "The Suburbs." Yet it certainly raises concerns about the value of the album, and what consumers will view as a reasonable price. 

As first reported last night by indie rockers Spoon, the Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" has debuted at No. 1 atop Billboard's charts. In its first week of release, the latest from the Canadian orchestral pop outfit sold 156,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan, narrowly edging out Eminem's "Recovery," at No. 2 with 152,000 copies sold. 

The achievement is the first-ever No. 1 album for a Merge Records release on the U.S. pop chart. Founded in the late '80s by Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan of indie band Superchunk, Merge has won a reputation for releasing quality, left-of-center pop acts. In addition to the Arcade Fire, the label has had solid sales successes with minimalist art-rockers Spoon, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's vintage pop project She & Him and the more eccentric Magnetic Fields -- but never a No. 1 album.

The Arcade Fire came close to the top spot with 2007's "Neon Bible," an album that opened at No. 2 with 92,000 copies sold. The top-selling album that week was Notorious B.I.G.'s "Greatest Hits," which opened with 99,000 copies sold. 

Though interest in the band continues to grow, sales of "The Suburbs" were helped no doubt by Amazon.com discounting the album to $3.99 for its entire first week of release. Comparatively, the album was selling for the typical $9.99 on Apple's iTunes store. Although SoundScan doesn't break down digital sales by retailer, a whopping 97,000 digital copies of "The Suburbs" were purchased, according to Billboard. 

For some perspective, only 59,000 physical copies of "The Suburbs" were sold, less than the total first week sales of the band's "Neon Bible." Digital sales accounted for 62% of first-week purchases of "The Suburbs." Though digital album sales continue to grow, that's way ahead of the industry pace. Last month, Nielsen SoundScan reported that digital sales account for 27.4% of all album purchases, with the bulk of sales still coming from the declining CD market. 

The weekly numbers from Nielsen SoundScan aren't given the official unveiling until Wednesday morning, but perhaps Chapel Hill, N.C.'s Merge Records can be forgiven for not being totally hip to music industry embargoes. After all, it's not often the indie label founded by Superchunk's Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan has the No. 1 album in the U.S. Heck, never mind often -- the label has never topped the U.S. pop charts before. 

But despite a valiant effort from Eminem, the adventurous orchestral pop act Arcade Fire will find itself at No. 1 first thing Wednesday morning -- errrr, probably, and most assuredly definitely, but Nielsen SoundScan isn't talking. 

Yet if Merge and its close-knit family of bands is to be believed, the Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" sold 156,000 copies in the U.S., according to Spoon's official Twitter page. Yes, Spoon, the Austin, Texas-bred minimalist art-rockers, are the ones who broke the news of Arcade Fire's first-week sales. 

The 156,000 number -- should it hold -- rockets passed the first-week sales of the band's "Neon Bible," which bowed with 92,000 copies sold back in March of 2007. "Neon Bible" missed the No. 1 spot, albeit narrowly. The top-selling album that week was Notorious B.I.G.'s "Greatest Hits," which opened with 99,000 copies sold. 

"The Suburbs" has been one of the year's most hotly anticipated indie releases, and tracks began hitting the Web back in May. The album received three-and-a-half (out of four) stars from the Times, and sales were no doubt helped by an extremely low digital price from Amazon.com. The retailer sold a full download of the album for $3.99.

Such fire sales are not new for Amazon. U2's "No Line on the Horizon," for instance, was discounted to $3.99 during its first week of release, and Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest" posted high digital sales numbers after being given the nice price of $3.99 in its first week, with 13,000 of its debut-week sales of 33,000 coming from the digital marketplace. Yet it was rare to see the retailer carry the low price for the entire first week of release, as Amazon's $3.99 promos more typically last for 24 hours. The album is now selling for $7.99.

Also of note, the Arcade Fire were selling the download for $7.99. The download edition from the band came complete with "synchronized artwork." The visuals are synced to the songs, creating a sort of moving picture book for computers and portable devices. 

-- Todd Martens

Photos: Top, the Arcade Fire perform at Lollapalooza in Chicago, 2010. Credit: Associated Press. Middle: A screenshot of Spoon's official Twitter page. 

In “We Used to Wait,” a restlessly mutating song deep in the recesses of the Arcade Fire’s ambitious new album, “The Suburbs,” Win Butler sings about a time when handwritten letters were the norm, and we waited for correspondences to wend their way through the postal system.

But Butler, the lead singer and principal lyricist for the Quebecois band, isn’t nostalgic by practice. “By the time we met,” he admits, “the times had already changed. So I never wrote a letter. I never took my true heart. I never wrote it down.” Later he says he will do these things, but it’s safe to file that under “the broken promises we make to ourselves in the instant gratification age.” Sure, and less time on Facebook as well, right?

One promise that the Arcade Fire keeps is crafting an old-fashioned, back-to-front exploration of one topic. In this case, it’s suburbia, the album’s most immediate symbol of complacency. But Arcade Fire’s third album doesn’t seek to condemn; the band knows that whether in a city — its Montreal or here in Los Angeles — or a subdivision outside Houston, (where Butler grew up), we’re all grasping for meaning. We’re searching in the shadows of the shopping malls that singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne observes endlessly rising in “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”

Claiming seven members, though often swelling to more in a live setting, Arcade Fire first gained recognition in indie circles with its 2004 debut, “Funeral,” which established its talent for combining the symphonic with a certain wiry punk agility. By the time its follow-up, “Neon Bible,” landed in 2007, Arcade Fire was headlining venues such as the Hollywood Bowl, where it first played in 2005 with admirer David Byrne.

Arcade Fire tends to cleave to singular concepts, wrenching elaborate but intimate orchestrations from both the big strokes and nuances, but on its previous efforts, the results were sometimes too pristinely chilled on art-rock ice.

Occasionally, the band gets trapped in the same frost on “The Suburbs,” but the moments when it strikes warmth are some of the best of its career. Arcade Fire seems to have borrowed ideas from such bards of the wasteland as Bruce Springsteen. And while they don’t fashion songs with the immediate hit potency as “Dancing in the Dark,” the band members find a way to tap into the same approachable frustration and tenderness.

“Modern Man” is an impeccable showcase, a mature, controlled song that features a vision of the so-called Modern Man waiting in line, going nowhere, bothered by some ineffable sense of opportunity unfulfilled. It’s underscored by rough, cottony guitars that almost occlude the song’s chillier synth effects.

In one of the record’s many wonders of sequencing — a lost art in the download age resurrected on “The Suburbs” — “Modern Man” is followed by “Rococo,” a resplendent epic wound up by near-hysterical strings that encases one of the album’s trickiest sentiments: Making fun of the modern kids. It’s hard to tell if Butler was once one of them or not. Is it a swipe at what he knows all too well, or is he simply casting disparagements? Either way, Butler sounds angry. He nearly spits out the word “rococo,” as if the fanciful living rooms of old — picture the Draper household in “Mad Men” — will explode into flames from his very force.

The Arcade Fire's 2004 debut "Funeral" careened the band out of Canada's then-burgeoning indie scene with an orchestral-pop grandeur. On record, the songs were ornate, and hinted at the near relentless instrument-swapping theatricality that has marked the act's live shows.

A follow-up, 2007's "Neon Bible," took a turn for the somber, dialing down some of the act's momentum. While there were stand-out moments, such as the hymn-like "Intervention," a slow-building anthem driven by church organs, the act's skepticism toward big ideas such as faith, consumerism and suburbia weren't always matched with the requisite drama.

An early peek at the band's third album, "The Suburbs," which won't be released until Aug. 3, may on first listen present an image of a band that's taking a more inward focus. "Gonna make a record in the month of May," singer Win Butler snarls in the opening moments of "Month of May," one of two new tracks the band officially unveiled on its Web site today. It's loud, fast and shockingly direct, built around a punk rock beat and tersely fuzzed-up guitars. Butler sounds a bit like Neil Young, and the riffs come off like a nod to early Queens of the Stone Age.

Yet for a band that hasn't yet shied away from tackling weighty issues, is one to be a little underwhelmed that the Arcade Fire now appear to be singing about rock 'n' roll? Pair it, however, with "The Suburbs," the album's title track that was made available for purchase today, and a bigger vision starts to take shape.