Album Review: Arcade Fire, Pink Elephant

Their first album since 2022 brought a raft of sexual misconduct allegations against frontman Win Butler, which he denies, Pink Elephant sees Canadian alt-rock juggernaut Arcade Fire hit introspection mode.

“It’s a season of change and if you feel strange, it’s probably good,” is the mantra-like coda duetted by Win and his wife and co-vocalist, Régine Chassagne, on lead single ‘Year Of The Snake’, which builds from a low-key opening into an arms-in-the-air stomper.

It’s spine-tinglingly shivery, but such pinch-me moments are rare here from a band who usually specialise in them. Indeed, three of the tracks on the album – which is co-produced by Butler and Chassagne along with Daniel Lanois – are short, ambient instrumentals, which really only serve as intros to the seven remaining songs proper.

The call-and-response ‘Alien Nation’ is a fugue of hip-hop beats, cacophonic guitar, pulsing bass and screamed vocals, like a bizarre mixture between Led Zeppelin and Nine Inch Nails. ‘Ride Or Die’ is sadly not an Arxx cover, but instead a tender, mostly acoustic rumination on relationships and love, and one that feels real

But the dancefloor-friendly ‘I Love Her Shadow’, complete with 4/4 beat and bouncing bass, has b-side written all over it, while the closing, almost seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Stuck In My Head’ feels like an OK idea stretched beyond breaking point.

Pink Elephant feels like the promising demos for a work-in-progress rather than a finished album. When it’s good, it’s very, very good, but when it’s bad, it’s average.

7/10

Out now