Arcade Fire have a place in the 21st century indie rock history books. To be honest, it’s quite possibly the only laurel the band has left to rest on. Many regard their 9-year run from Funeral through Reflektor as one of the strongest of the mid-2000s and early-2010s, if not the strongest of that era. Arcade Fire, the Strokes, Radiohead—these are names lauded as originators, as boundary pushers, needle movers, and the voices of a generation. Survey the rock and roll landscape 20 years ago and most music blogs may have had you convinced that Kid A, Is This It, and Funeral were as integral to the new millennium as Revolver and Pet Sounds were to the mid-1960s.
But, no matter what you think of Funeral or The Suburbs, there is no denying that Arcade Fire have not been a relevant name in music since 2013—though I’d argue that their stock began plummeting soon after they won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2011. Reflektor is a record that, to my ears, ages worse with every listen. Though, now that Pink Elephant exists, perhaps Reflektor’s image can be restored. As for WE and Everything Now? Both titles are still firmly subterranean (and their high review scores on this site are none of my business), but I do miss when Arcade Fire was just entering the twilight of their relevance—when the rumors about them were still just whispers and they were selling branded fidget spinners.
Pink Elephant, Arcade Fire’s first release since WE, comes with a catch: You have to achieve a certain level of cognitive dissonance to even press play on a mess like this. Three years ago, Butler was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, as was reported by Pitchfork. Remarks about extramarital relationships, unwanted contact, sexting, age-gaps with power imbalances, and sexual assault filled the article. When asked to comment on the allegations, Butler responded to Pitchfork via a crisis PR expert named Risa Heller, who communicated an offer to the publication: conversations with women who had consensual sex with the musician. His wife Régine Alexandra Chassagne’s response? “He has lost his way, and he has found his way back.”
I believe that using an artist’s rap sheet in an evaluation of their work can be useful, but not always. Just look at this subtitle in a recent headline from The Telegraph: “an assured comeback from the brink of cancellation.” In the case of Arcade Fire, writing about their new album without including the context of the allegations against Butler would be a moral failure, regardless of where you land in the “separating the art from the artist” debate. This is especially true considering how much of Pink Elephant’s subtext is kneecapped by thinly-veiled attempts to repair a broken ego: The high-horse posturing in the “clean up your heart” charade of “Stuck in My Head” is an especially cocksure failure, while Butler likening the prejudices held against him to brains being hacked and then demanding that his listeners “take your mind off me” is equally self-involved.
What’s worse, however, would be to use the allegations against Butler as a launching point for some argument that Arcade Fire have been through Hell and lived to tell the tale, so to speak. This band is not “coming back” from anything but the consequences of their own harm towards others. Win Butler was not convicted of a crime. Cancel culture doesn’t exist, but accountability does—and the court of public opinion can be a merciless one. But the way that you respond to that opinion, however, is a crucial next step. Reading the lyric sheet for Pink Elephant, you’re hit with 40 minutes of denial veiled as profundity from one of the most categorically superficial bands of the last 25 years. Your coworker probably loves this album. From the jump, Arcade Fire treats its listeners like they’re stupid, playing coy about moral turmoil by making hippy-dippy, “I’m a real boy” synth-rock that’s remarkably one-dimensional. “My heart’s full of love,” Butler shouts on “Year of the Snake.” “It’s not made out of wood.” Okay Pinocchio, you’re 45 years old.
Pink Elephant isn’t merely an album released after a “cancellation,” or what Apple Music has labeled as “three tumultuous years.” It’s a bad gesture of faith from a band that’s woefully out of touch. Seriously, this album is clunky, poorly mixed, offensively self-serving, and annoyingly regurgitated. The multi-part suites that made Arcade Fire’s previous releases sound like boom-or-bust sagas have been swapped out for lackadaisical, dogmatic doses of soulless, false glory. Unfortunately, most of Pink Elephant’s best moments are the instrumental passages, like “Open Your Heart or Die Trying,” “Beyond Salvation,” and “She Cries Diamond Rain.” That is not an immediate dig at Butler or Chassagne, but a tip of the cap to Daniel Lanois, the Canadian producer best-known for his longtime relationship with U2, his work on Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and a recent foray into videogame soundtracks.
Lanois’ command of ambience is right at home in the wordless triplicate, though his “mainstream” approach to rock production hurts some of the more “blockbuster” efforts on the album, like the underwater twang of “Stuck in My Head” or the chugging, laser synths and disco patterns wrapped around Butler and Chassagne’s voices during “Circle of Trust,” the latter song an obvious treatise on the duo’s matrimony. But this is not Beyoncé and Jay-Z seemingly working through their marriage in different rooms on Lemonade and 4:44. This sounds like a calculated yet thin attempt to project a certain kind of assured unity. “I would die for your love, write your name in fire in the sky for your love,” Butler sings, before trying to enact some absolution of wrongdoing by dismissing the malice of his own affairs: “I would lie for your love.”
The better love song on Pink Elephant (and “love” is a stretch) is “Ride or Die,” a finger-picked ballad where Butler and Chassagne aren’t doubling down on their faith in each other, but instead imagining what next step their until-death union might take. The walls they’ve built are now cracked, but they don’t recede, rising up instead to meet the moment without ambiguous recoil. “I could work an office job, and you could be a waitress,” Butler hums against thumping percussion and atmospheric gusts. “I could take you anywhere, wind is blowing back your hair. I could be a movie star, you could be an actress.” There’s a sincerity lingering in “Ride or Die,” one not unlike the self-examining optimism and empowering honesty that became a portal to success for Arcade Fire 21 years ago on Funeral.
Arcade Fire nearly get the U2 treatment from Lanois on Pink Elephant—an effort to offset their lack of innovation by making them more stadium-ready than ever. The only problem is that so little of the album sounds bombastic enough to warrant a capacity crowd into the thousands. Most of the songs are strangely disjointed, as if Butler, Chassagne, and Lanois stitched electronics and baroque instruments together in separate rooms. (It doesn’t help that only three songs feature the entirety of the Arcade Fire quintet.) “Pink Elephant” and “Year of the Snake” are both deceptively lo-fi—hardly the type of ascending music that could light up a 30-foot stage on football turf. The one exception is the somewhat enjoyable (but awfully mixed) closer “Stuck in My Head,” which is raucously loose and full of anthemic chanting.
The music of “I Love Her Shadow” has streaks of catchiness that would have flourished while tucked in-between “Porno” and “Afterlife” 12 years ago. But Pink Elephant’s dancier moments deserved a more pop-minded producer, like how Reflektor was improved greatly by James Murphy’s touch. What we get under Lenois’ leadership are off-center, weakened beats and pompous invectives that could have used a few more rounds with an editor willing to push back on Butler’s lost-plot motifs. “I Love Her Shadow,” as sugary as the melody turns, is where it’s impossible to separate Pink Elephant from the allegations around Butler. He admitted to Pitchfork that he previously used social media apps to “meet people,” which makes the bridge of the song a tone-deaf summation: “I want you to tell me everything ‘bout your hometown and the stars,” he sings. “I wanna make new constellations from your permanent scars. We never met, but I remember who you are.” Then, to stop the bleeding, Butler resorts to childish petal-picking: “She loves me, she loves me not.”
What’s more is that “Alien Nation” might be the worst Arcade Fire song to date. The awful instrumentalism—horribly panned vocal microphones and insectoid clips mixed oddly into a platter of synthesizers—isn’t quite as heinous as the lyrics, which are drowsy, unstimulated notes-app ramblings deluded by out-of-pocket mentions of a “fake friend phone,” “Black Friday cyber attack,” “the God of love,” and “freeway fracking.” None of those words mean anything—their lack of cohesion could have painfully fit well on Everything Now—and “Alien Nation” is sorely listless until Butler’s robotic groveling stumbles into a thesis of some kind: “I return to all my enemies all the pain they would like to or could have caused me. I return this evil to them with love, in the name of the Alien Nation.” Ignorance is a potent drug.
While Win Butler’s post-allegations gimmick hasn’t landed him on any far-right podcasts (yet), his and the band’s decision to avoid press around Pink Elephant likely saved us from puff pieces declaring the record to be some kind of sensational, anti-woke crusade. Instead, he put his frustrations into the music itself, letting each song do his bidding—though he couldn’t totally abstain from pontificating in a public space, sporting a resonator guitar with the words “the machine is broken” scribbled across the metal during a recent performance on Saturday Night Live. But he is not the culturally exiled extraterrestrial that he feigns himself to be, though his dignity has left the Earth’s orbit almost entirely. His diatribes aren’t righteous or cathartic, they’re humiliation rituals set to music. If Pink Elephant is your first Arcade Fire album and you were hoping to dive further into their discography, then I have good news for you: Their pageant of ordinary only gets better from here.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
