Reflektor

James Murphy joined the project in August 2012. The band had planned a short record but ended up with 18 long songs, so it was split into a double album. The manager said it cost $1.6 million. Haitian rara, the film Black Orpheus and Kierkegaard's essay Two Ages shaped it. Sessions were held in Louisiana, in Jamaica, mostly on analogue tape, and in Montreal.

It reached number one in the US, with 140,000 copies in its first week, and in the UK and Canada. Metacritic scored it 80. Rolling Stone's David Fricke called it the best album the band had made, and Pitchfork's Lindsay Zoladz gave it 9.2. It won the Juno for Album of the Year in 2014 and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

The band also wrote the score for Spike Jonze's film Her with Owen Pallett. "Supersymmetry" was written for the film and later appeared on Reflektor, and the melody of "Porno" can be heard on the soundtrack. In January 2013 they announced that the Farnham church studio was for sale because its roof had collapsed. A surprise show at Club Salsatheque in Montreal on 9 September 2013 was filmed for an NBC special, and they were Saturday Night Live's musical guest on 28 September 2013. Pitchfork's Lindsay Zoladz called the double album "a triumph, but not a victory lap" and noted that the band had posted a video of the whole album set to the 1959 film Black Orpheus. The documentary The Reflektor Tapes, directed by Kahlil Joseph, came out on 24 September 2015, with a deluxe edition of the album the next day.