How does a band come back from a disaster? In 2022, Arcade Fire tried with We, an album consciously constructed to sound like their old records. It was a remedy to the toxic reaction provoked by their previous LP, 2017’s half-baked socio-political broadside Everything Now, and its comically misguided promotional rollout, in which the band mocked the very media outlets they were trying to court. On We, they did away with the predecessor’s performative irony and ham-fisted, anti-Internet commentary and re-embraced the hyperbolic earnestness that marked their early work. The results were mixed but it was, as intended, a reset of sorts.
Three months later, Pitchfork published an exhaustive investigative report delving into allegations of sexual misconduct against Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler. Four accusers outlined a range of offenses, from unwanted sexts to unwelcome sexual advances. (You can read the story here.) The article also put Arcade Fire’s previous disaster in perspective. A critically derided album, after all, is hardly a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Whereas now Butler was responding to negative media attention via a crisis management PR flack.
Three years later, Arcade Fire has released another album, Pink Elephant, with the purpose of once again resetting their career. It’s hard to know, exactly, how the accusations against Butler influenced the contents of Pink Elephant, since he isn’t doing interviews. But he must know that listeners are going to close-read the lyrics, and it’s not like this band has ever been subtle when it comes to making a point. Even two of the instrumental tracks, “Open Your Heart Or Die Trying” and “Beyond Salvation,” tip the band’s hand in a clear direction. And then there’s “Year Of The Snake,” Pink Elephant‘s first single, which alludes to the zodiac sign representing transformation. “I need a clean break,” Butler sings with his wife and bandmate, Regine Chassagne. On the next track, “Circle Of Trust” — another song with a loaded title — he likens himself to Icarus, the go-to mythological metaphor for self-destructive hubris. Though that doesn’t stop Butler from the passive-aggressive posturing of the next track, “Alien Nation,” where he pleads to “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 Alien Nation.”
More telling than these sentiments — equally weighted with self-pity, resentment, and “let’s move on already” restlessness — is the music on Pink Elephant. Currently set as a five-piece, a relatively pared-back lineup for this famously expansive band, Arcade Fire actually sounds more like a duo these days. I’m not going to speculate on the state of the Butler-Chassagne marriage, but they are evidently working through some things on this record. The music sounds as heavy and deflated as the tunes on We were ginned up and grandiose. Co-producer Daniel Lanois brings some of his trademark atmospheric soundscapes, most notably on those scene-setting interstitial tracks. But Pink Elephant has virtually none of the chest-thumping caterwauling this band is none for.
If We was an attempt to remind listeners of their triumphs during the Funeral-to-The Suburbs era, Pink Elephant feels like a reversion to the mean of their 2010s artistic decline. This is true in ways that are painfully on-the-nose, like the aforementioned “Alien Nation,” a limp disco-rocker that mostly rails against modernity à la Everything Now. (“Lonely but never alone / Tethered to a fake friend phone,” etc. etc.) But, creatively at least, Arcade Fire’s core problem remains a diminished sense of purpose. The musical flourishes that do stand out — the “Harvest Moon”-quoting melody of “Year Of The Snake,” the attempted dance-pop reveries of “I Love Her Shadow,” the intimate romantic devotional “Ride Or Die” — nevertheless feel muted and ultimately noncommittal. It’s enough to make a person wonder, “Why am I listening to this?” (Anyone not paid to do it, anyway.)
Pink Elephant arrives amid a growing wave of post-#MeToo (and post-Trump re-election) returns by once-beleaguered musical acts, including rapper Trey Songz (accused of sexual assault and abuse by multiple women) and the emo band Brand New (multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against singer Jesse Lacey, including solicitation of naked photos from two underaged girls). The former already has returned successfully to the road, and the latter has booked a summer arena tour that’s selling well.
What’s been shown, time and again, is that the ability to “cancel” an artist, as it were, does not belong with those who already object to the alleged offenses. It’s with the people still inclined to seek out (in this instance) a new Arcade Fire album. Or, should the band decide to tour, purchase a concert ticket. The audience that either does not know about the accusations against Butler or believes that they shouldn’t outweigh their own personal enjoyment of Arcade Fire’s music. One of those people, apparently, is Lorne Michaels, the storied executive producer of Saturday Night Live, who has booked Arcade Fire twice in the past three months, once for the show’s 50th anniversary concert and again for this weekend’s episode with host Walton Goggins. (This is just a theory, but I wonder if Michaels might have acted differently if the Win Butler story had been reported by The New York Times rather than Pitchfork. Louis C.K., for one, has not been invited back to SNL after his own exposure in that “hometown” NYC publication.)
The conversation about appropriate consequences for public figures that have faced scrutiny for bad private behavior — though without being prosecuted by legal authorities or even being charged with a crime — is important and ongoing. But in the space of this column, which ostensibly is a record review, I need to focus for now on an art-centric question: What is the value of an Arcade Fire album in 2025?
Even if you’re acting on a purely mercenary level — like, say, deciding to book a commercially successful scoundrel like Morgan Wallen — sticking Arcade Fire on broadcast television’s premier weekly musical showcase strikes me as odd. This is a band that has not been at their best for 15 years, nearly an entire generation. They are, essentially, a nostalgia act at this point. If they tour and don’t stick mainly to the aughts-era hits, fans will be headed home early and letting their babysitters knock off well before the children’s bedtimes.
Someone like Wallen — who makes terrible, cookie-cutter music and appears to be an obnoxious jerk — at least has some relevant cultural currency as (inexplicably) one of the country’s biggest artists. The current status of Arcade Fire, meanwhile, is highly dubious. They remain famous in a “ask the average person to name an indie-rock band” kind of way. But their catalog of mediocre albums now outweighs the beloved early ones. And the nature of that mediocrity has stayed consistent — once a defining act of their era, they have been bereft of good ideas for a very long time now. Whether one chooses or not to push play on Pink Elephant based on ethical grounds is up to the individual. But artistically speaking, I doubt even the most stalwart Arcade Fire follower could muster up a compelling defense of the band’s post-Suburbs output.
If ever there was a time for Butler to write emotionally charged songs that feel like a matter of life or death, it’s now. That he’s instead produced an album as vacant as Pink Elephant suggests he’s still in crisis management mode. It is not a convincing mea culpa nor a cathartic rebirth. It neither explains nor rectifies. Worst of all — for those who care about this record, at any rate — it doesn’t distract. If you still love Arcade Fire’s music despite everything, Pink Elephant will not transcend the “everything” part. It’s simply not worth it.
Pink Elephant is out 5/9 via Columbia. Find more information here.
