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.
