Arcade Fire - Pink Elephant
Open Your Heart or Die Trying.
When one of the very few artists to ever receive a 10.0/10 from me announces a new album, the anticipation isn’t just high—it’s cosmic. That’s exactly what happened when Arcade Fire announced Pink Elephant.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I won’t be discussing the allegations against Win Butler here. You either already know the story, or you can read the original Pitchfork article from two years ago that broke it. I won’t debate the “separating art from the artist” mantra either—it’s just dumb. Still, Arcade Fire has never been just one man. It’s a band. And yet, it’s hard to ignore how those accusations—and everything that followed—shifted the group’s internal chemistry. Because Pink Elephant doesn’t sound like the Arcade Fire I once knew. At least, not quite.
So what is Pink Elephant? It’s a 42-minute alien version of Arcade Fire. The bones are there—the band still flirts with their signature tender indie aesthetic, the face is familiar, draped in the same melancholic undercurrent—but the heart is missing. The album leans into indie electronica, alternative dance, and fragmented indie rock. It’s packed with interludes, intros, and outros—once tools for narrative momentum—but here, they feel less like momentum and more like a waste of time.
There are echoes of past glories—vocal melodies, instrumental choices that recall their mid-2000s peak, lyrical themes they’ve been circling for decades. And yet, this time, it’s not enough. When the final track fades out, I didn’t feel satisfaction. Or catharsis. Not even disappointment. I felt emptiness. Because this album is empty.
Instrumentally, the album brings nothing particularly fresh. Sure, the long intros, outros, and ambient interludes are stylistically familiar—but they go nowhere. Even the opening track drags for an unnecessary three minutes when its idea is already exhausted by the first. These aren’t immersive builds; they’re time-fillers.
From a technical standpoint, Pink Elephant isn’t well mixed, nor is it particularly well produced. Sonically, it feels vague and undercooked. I was hoping for sharp lyricism—some self-excavation, or at the very least, a scathing disappointment in society. Instead, the album stumbles backwards into teenage love clichés that feel wildly out of place, losing its narrative thread mid-song and never quite picking it back up. It feels overlong, overly dramatic, and—here comes the word I almost never use in reviews—boring.
And that’s not something I ever imagined saying about Arcade Fire. This is the band that once painted vivid emotional films in your mind using nothing but their instruments. You didn’t need visuals—you felt what they felt and lost track of time with masterpieces like The Suburbs and Funeral. Even when they softened or ventured into new territories with albums like WE or Everything Now, you understood their evolution and rooted for them. But here, it feels like their movie collection has run out, and there’s nothing left to play next.
And let’s not forget, this was supposed to be a delicate comeback—a moment of reckoning after the controversy that forever damaged the reputation of one of their key members in the eyes of a discerning audience. But it’s none of that. It’s simply... there. Some artists, after events like these, either fade away or fight to prove themselves even harder. But Arcade Fire?...just didn’t care?
Sure, there are good moments, even good songs—”Year of a Snake”, “Pink Elephant”. But even these tracks aren’t worth highlighting. They’re just okay. And Arcade Fire is not a band that should ever be merely "okay."
It’s kind of heartbreaking, really. To see a band that shaped so much of indie music now seem so lost within it. On the opening track, they offer to "open your heart or die trying." The tragedy is—maybe they died trying.
5.0/10
