It’s hard to imagine Arcade Fire winning over any new fans with their seventh album, Pink Elephant. The hope and fervor that once powered their anthems curdled somewhere around the mid-2010s, when the music grew poppier but the attitude more cynical. The ranking of their albums is pretty straightforward, following chronological order: 2004’s Funeral, 2007’s Neon Bible, 2010’s The Suburbs, 2013’s Reflektor, followed by a steep drop-off in quality. Nothing from the last three records—2017’s Everything Now, 2022’s We, and now Pink Elephant—would make it onto an Arcade Fire best-of. Musically, the brooding rock of Pink Elephant at least sounds better to me than the clunky disco of We and the Coldplay-ish vibes of Everything Now. The subject matter makes it an uncomfortable listen, though.
“Stuck in my head,” “take your mind off me,” “circle of trust,” “season of change”—the kinds of choruses presented on Pink Elephant hint vaguely at a fallout and subsequent rehabilitation. In the rawest moments of the record, you can feel singer Win Butler’s reverence towards Régine Chassagne, his wife and co-captain in the Montreal collective. “I could work a 9-to-5, you could be a waitress,” he sings on album highlight “Ride or Die.” We could ditch this whole rock’n’roll business and start again, in other words. Does he mean it?
The crucial context here are the 2022 allegations of sexual misconduct made against Butler by four people, including fans between the ages of 18 and 23, as reported by Marc Hogan in Pitchfork. Their stories involved meeting Butler in or around the music scene and saying they felt pressured into sexual encounters with him, citing unprovoked sexting, manipulation, misread signals, or straight-up ignoring a “no.” Responding to the allegations in that same report, Butler and Chassagne explained that they had an open marriage; Butler apologized and admitted his struggles with alcohol and depression had clouded his judgement at times. He also denied the allegations, writing: “I have never touched a woman against her will, and any implication that I have is simply false. I vehemently deny any suggestion that I forced myself on a woman or demanded sexual favors. That simply, and unequivocally, never happened.”
The Arcade Fire subreddit is filled with fans who dismiss the investigation as Pitchfork plotting to tear down a band it once championed. Others take the middle ground, positioning the allegations as a misunderstanding around consent. When someone stays a fan of an artist in the face of sexual misconduct allegations, or actively leaves behind that fandom, it is a choice. But there’s another, less intentional form of apathy that takes hold: It was easy for casual listeners to ignore Arcade Fire in the face of these claims because the music has been going downhill for a long time. Pink Elephant didn’t crack the Billboard 200 album chart at all—the first AF album to miss the chart. I’ve seen some viral takes online about this, to the extent of: “cancel culture is real.” It’s more complicated than that, and yet not that complicated at all: Indie culture moved on from this band years ago.
The mainstream music industry hasn’t, though. Saturday Night Live, Bonnaroo, a Spotify party last summer—all of these opportunities are still available to Arcade Fire. They remain signed to a major label, Columbia Records. Too many people have invested time and money into Arcade Fire’s ongoing success for the whole thing to just dissolve, like it probably should. With the allegations against Butler being downplayed or debated to the minutiae, those working with the band can continue on as though the 2022 report never happened. I mean, the music industry will forgive almost anything if they can still make money off an artist. Will the support remain intact for the next album, now that Pink Elephant has essentially flopped?
I got rid of my Arcade Fire vinyl after the allegations came out. Employed by Pitchfork at the time, I wasn’t involved with the piece but I knew firsthand how long and carefully the reporter, Marc Hogan, had worked on it. Marc and I had talked many times about the nuances of reporting this kind of story, and the difficult conversations with survivors that it entails. I trusted the process and believed them. A man’s fame combined with his reported persistence made people feel like they hadn’t consented to what transpired, or couldn’t stop a sexual situation from happening, and were left feeling unsettled in the aftermath. I guarantee almost every single woman has felt this way at one point or another while interacting romantically, sexually, or even platonically with a man, myself included. I can’t imagine the devastation of it happening with a celebrity I admired.
As a former AF fan, I felt like I had put my faith in a band when I was young and overly earnest, and they ultimately didn’t deserve it. My experience as a onetime true believer might help explain why these allegations that some people dismiss as minor are actually a breach of fans’ trust. The group portrayed itself as a family act, outspoken about the ills of modern society, always projecting good liberal values.
For most people, you’ll never love music more, in that formative and obsessive way, than you do when you’re between the ages of 14 and 21. A friend in my freshman dorm gave me a burned copy of Funeral on CD in 2006, shortly after I turned 18. I was the right age and political affiliation for Arcade Fire to work on me. It was the micro-era of millennials who graduated college during Obama’s first term, who helped him win the vote by believing his promise of hope and change. Arcade Fire were the quintessential band for that moment. Win posed with Springsteen on the cover of Spin around the release of Neon Bible, ready to play the liberal rock mouthpiece at a time when the biggest political concern was the war in Iraq. I adopted him as a hero, and saw in the former theology student a strong sense of justice about the world. While the rest of the band would go absolutely feral on stage, Win was like a preacher in black leading the sermon with tortured concentration.
AF’s 2007 tour stop in Columbus, Ohio was, for many years, the best concert I ever saw. After waiting outside the venue for most of the afternoon, I was dead center and against the barrier, close enough that I made eye contact with multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry a few times. Arcade Fire’s energy during this early period was unmatched, a living breathing entity constantly switching instruments, screaming into megaphones, and sweating through their suits. At any given time, three or four people might be playing percussion, including Régine wearing a glockenspiel, Reed with a snare rigged to him like a soldier, and Win’s brother Will using his literal body as a drum. The performances were visceral, the music was urgent, and the idealism ran frighteningly, naively high. I had my first out-of-body concert experience that night, fully sober; it felt like fainting into a bright light over and over again. There was still a vulnerable aspect to the intensity of their shows back then. The diehard fandom was mostly scrappy young people with an underdog complex and a love of ornate indie rock, as far as I could tell.
In early 2008, Arcade Fire performed three shows in battleground states in support of Obama’s campaign—one in North Carolina and two in Ohio, including a tiny, 19th-century opera house just outside of my rural college town. Getting tickets required waiting in a long line early on a Saturday in 20-degree weather, and they played multiple sets for maximum exposure. This included a fairly scorching cover of John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth,” a song that rails against institution after institution. As the band packed up their gear after the show, I approached Win for an interview for the local paper. All I remember asking him was if he, a Texan living in Montreal, would ever consider living in America again, and he scoffed a little. Eight months later, Obama was elected—and won Ohio’s vote by nearly five points.
I graduated college in 2010, a few weeks after the release of The Suburbs, and I spent that whole summer driving around a new city listening to it. A double album that revisited and ultimately shed its creators’ disillusionments about childhood, The Suburbs always seemed to me like a record about the death of the American dream. Maybe it was the timing: the years immediately following the recession, when everything felt tenuous for millennials just starting our adult lives. But when Arcade Fire took home the Grammy for Album of the Year for The Suburbs in 2012, it hit almost like a win for everyone in the indie rock professional class, since the album was released via Merge. This was a band I still wanted to believe in, an underdog in the context of Grammy land. It was the end of an era.
From that point on, Arcade Fire dutifully played the role of indie rock ambassador to the major leagues of popular music, one that gets cozy with their station of importance, million-dollar album budgets, and Tidal co-ownership. Win and Régine took more of the center stage, as the primary songwriters and public heart of the project. Which doesn’t totally take into account what made Arcade Fire great on record and in live shows: the collective force of the group, some related by blood or marriage and others by spiritual kinship. With the exception of Will Butler, most of the same players orbit the group, but the lineup varies from performance to performance.
“Now that I’m older/My heart’s colder/And I can see that it’s a lie,” screamed Butler on 2004’s “Wake Up,” the Arcade Fire anthem to end all anthems. On Pink Elephant, he whispers about a feared reality where his child turns against him and he loses his family. It’s hard not to twist Win’s lines back on him now, to un-know what I know. Like on “The Suburbs” when he goes, “So can you understand/why I want a daughter while I’m still young/Want to hold her hand and show her some beauty before the damage is done.” I can’t hear those words in the warm, paternal way I once did, knowing that someone else’s daughter claims he damaged her. It’s as simple as that when it comes to these matters of art vs. artist: Can you listen to the music without hearing ghosts in it?
