No verdict in the court of public opinion could be harsher than the one Arcade Fire have rendered upon themselves: They’ve created their own prison with Pink Elephant, a vow of penance that spends 42 minutes equivocating and demurring, against their every impulse to do the opposite. Win Butler is barely audible for the first half of lead single “Year of the Snake.” The album rollout has not inspired any credulous Hollywood Reporter profiles, interactive music videos, or fake websites. It lasted a month and has been accompanied by a near-total media blackout, save for a promotional tour of “intimate venues” and a frankly astonishing sixth appearance on Saturday Night Live. But the overall message has been clear: Arcade Fire would change their name if they hadn’t tried that already.
Of all the things Arcade Fire have learned from U2, nothing has taken hold like the goal of “reapplying” to be the best band in the world. But while Bono only said that once, Arcade Fire have spent the past 15 years since The Suburbs adjusting the cover letter and padding the résumé, desperate to figure out what the best band in the world is supposed to be. The irony and piety of 2017’s Everything Now and 2022’s WE cancelled each other out, attached to works of great effort and little conviction that made Arcade Fire seem equally unpersuasive as satirists or saviors. That was only accelerated by the accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against Win Butler in 2022. To whatever degree Arcade Fire were cancelled, the tours and SNL 50 appearances were not. You could argue that bigger monsters are thriving in relative peace, or that Butler is being punished less for his actions than for how they conflict with his reputation. So it is in a culture that’s more forgiving of creeps than hypocrites.
I might have avoided discussing this subject entirely if it weren’t the subtext and, sometimes, the text itself of Pink Elephant, casting a shadow far darker and longer than the still-imposing legacy of Funeral or The Suburbs. Arcade Fire spend Pink Elephant cowering in that shadow, offering ambiguous sloganeering, non-apology apologies, and arena rock that gets moved to the 1,500-cap venue due to sluggish ticket sales. The opening three-minute, lunar-roving drone of “Open Your Heart or Die Trying” promises a spiritual reboot, but also promises the same cinematic grandeur of other Arcade Fire albums. They repeat this trick twice more, which ends up having the opposite effect, exposing a threadbare motif that sticks Pink Elephant together like Scotch tape on a last-minute Christmas gift.
It’s still a way of flaunting their receipts, as Pink Elephant pulls yet another page from the U2 playbook by bringing in Daniel Lanois on production. A partnership that would have been sensational circa The Suburbs now feels sadly symbolic and transactional. Pink Elephant gets mentioned in the same breath as Time Out of Mind and Achtung Baby, while Lanois gets to update the CV; aside from U2 and Neil Young, Lanois’ mainstream rock production credits from the past 20 years are lesser-loved entries in the Dashboard Confessional and Killers catalogs. Was it really his idea to add the distorted microphones and insectoid buzzing into the overstuffed “Alien Nation” or the lopsided drum panning on “Stuck in my Head”?
Aside from those curiously tacky outliers, Lanois’ tasteful ambience dampens the band’s everlasting, pulsating indie rock; the blasé delivery of “I Love Her Shadow” might have worked within Reflektor’s icy cool disco, but a chorus of “breaking into heaven tonight” is supposed to re-spark their unforgettable fire. The core quintet appears together on only three songs, and while the resulting, leaner sound could be called “streamlined,” “spare,” or another euphemism, there’s a lack of soul and spirit more apparent than the missing string or synth overdubs. That weariness becomes its own kind of asset on Pink Elephant, a coherent mesh of sound and sentiment from a band that aspires to “moody” without ever figuring out what mood they’re trying to set.
On the title track, Butler sneers, “Take your mind off me,” a potential act of defiance as the album’s first chorus. But by “me,” he also means the pink elephant of ironic process theory. “Year of the Snake” makes intriguing use of Régine Chassagne on lead vocals, but saddles her with vague allusions to change and truth before Butler bursts out of the background to announce: “I’m a real boy/My heart’s full of love/It’s not made out of wood.” Much like his continuing grudge against smartphones or his heretofore unexplored love of Def Jam Vendetta-era rap (“Open Your Heart or Die Trying,” “Ride or Die”), Butler’s clunky rhymes can be charmingly anachronistic, or at the very least, the only things that can jolt Pink Elephant out of its torpor.
As album cuts, “Pink Elephant” and “Year of the Snake” would be considered “restrained.” As singles, Arcade Fire just sound repressed, in constant surveillance of their own instincts while never committing to their darker undertones or proprietary cathartic codas. Which is why “Ride or Die,” the most spare song on Pink Elephant, is the most affecting and effective. Butler coos, “I could work an office job/You could be a waitress” over barely-there guitars. (Even those who haven’t completely written off Arcade Fire may find this insufferable or, worse, self-serving.) He also claims, “I could be a movie star/You could be an actress,” a less romantic plea that nonetheless injects a real sense of personal stakes. Arcade Fire has been the dream of Win and Régine from the start and anyone following them now is still invested; “Ride or Die” acknowledges the crack in the fourth wall.
But that’s just prelude to the galactic self-pity of “Stuck in my Head,” which comes close to redeeming the entire project. At first, Butler continues to speak in platitudes about the pervasive mess in his life, in his head, in his car, in his bed. And then, a legitimately shocking line: “And if you leave, then I’ll start again/I could shave my head, turn my daughters against me/Erase my name, cut my credit card.” For a moment, that old-time religion of Arcade Fire is back, and Butler yells, “I quit this job! I quit this job!” It’s petulant, it’s ugly, and most importantly, it feels real and urgent, like something Butler had to say rather than something to fill up the margins. But Arcade Fire pull up again at the last minute, presenting “clean up your heart” as the song’s moral lesson and trying to get the listener to see themselves in its wildly unrelatable backstory.
It’s disappointing, but it also recognizes that the single most essential quality of Arcade Fire is mutual trust. Funeral, Neon Bible, and The Suburbs unlocked awesome, primal emotions that fans spent their adult lives trying to suppress and, more importantly, convinced them that Arcade Fire felt these emotions just as strongly; the result was some of the most powerful indie rock music ever created. For that, they were seen as not just interpreters of the divine, but divinity itself. But what’s a god to a non-believer? Whether it’s the dress code, or the galling lyrics of “Creature Comfort,” or Butler’s alleged behavior, that trust has been broken, and it isn’t something that can be repaired with one album. If Arcade Fire have another classic in them—ignoring all previous evidence to the contrary—is the public even ready to receive it? Though clearly a sacrificial lamb, Pink Elephant achieves what Reflektor and WE couldn’t, finding the connector, the confirmation that we’re all in this together: If you don’t believe in Arcade Fire right now, they don’t believe in themselves yet either.
