Pink Elephant

If you’re surprised that <i>Pink Elephant</i>, the first album by Arcade Fire in three tumultuous years, begins with a cinematic three-minute drone that summons the deep-space sounds of Morton Subotnick, check the credits. Alongside Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Daniel Lanois—a fellow Canadian who has applied a near-magical touch to records by U2, Bob Dylan and Brian Eno for nearly half a century—co-produced the band’s seventh album, speckling it with stereo delays and assorted abstractions. In fact, that opener, “Open Your Heart or Die Trying”, is but one of three instrumentals on this 10-track record. Where “Beyond Salvation” embeds scrambled samples amid a fantastic glissando, “She Cries Diamond Rain” is a celestial hum. These wordless pieces from the famously righteous Montreal-based outfit suggest a band trying to reimagine its future in the present, trying to feel its way forward after personnel and personal complications since 2022’s <i>WE</i>. The title track is a web of misgivings, Butler looking at the world and making mental traps of everything he encounters. During first single “Year of the Snake”, Lanois calls back to several of the techniques he used to make <i>The Joshua Tree</i> feel both anxious and epic as Chassagne and Butler deliver a fraught duet about where they head from here. “If you feel strange, it’s probably good,” they repeat, alternately delivering that last line like it soothes or stings. They experiment with a handful of new modes here, from the dark dancing of “Circle of Trust” to the arcing acoustic grandeur of “Ride or Die”. But they finally dig into their bygone glory days for closer “Stuck in My Head”, where throbbing bass and unrelenting drums push Butler to deal with his baggage, to figure out what happens next. “Clean up your head/Get the fuck out of bed,” he shouts over and over at the climax, like Springsteen stuck in a punk paroxysm. “Clean up your heart.”