This Is Happening
album by LCD Soundsystem
This Is Happening is the fourth studio album by American rock band LCD Soundsystem. It was released first on May 17, 2010, jointly through DFA and Virgin Records in the United States and Parlophone elsewhere. It was recorded over the course of 2009 and early 2010 in the Mansion recording studio in Los Angeles. The first single, "Pow Pow", was released in April 2010, with a music video directed by David Ayer.
Frontman James Murphy cited Bronski Beat, Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), and OMD's Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Organisation as inspirations for This Is Happening. The album is dedicated to Jerry Fuchs (1974–2009), who performed drums live with the band on occasion, in addition to being closely associated with other DFA acts.
Reception
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, This Is Happening received an average score of 84, based on 38 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". It also achieved an ADM Rating of 7.7/10 on another review aggregator, AnyDecentMusic?.
Guardian reviewer Alexis Petridis observed that the album did not contain Sound of Silver's "startling sense of mapping out new territories", instead sticking to a template that worked "incredibly well." Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal awarded it a Best New Music accolade, describing the album as "pretty perfect". In his review for AllMusic, Tim Sendra said that while This Is Happening "doesn't quite reach the monumental heights" of the band's previous album, it still provided proof that LCD Soundsystem was "one of the most exciting and interesting bands around in the 2000s." Sendra commended Murphy's expansion as a lyricist and songwriter, and said that his production on the album "reveal[s] him at the top of his game".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “This Is Happening” is album by LCD Soundsystem. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Happening, album and Soundsystem, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “album by LCD Soundsystem” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2620579. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2009 and 1974.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “This Is Happening” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.