“‘Don‘t think of a pink elephant!’ is an impossible instruction,” psychologist Janice Morse and philosopher Carl Mitcham wrote in a 2002 International Journal of Qualitative Methods article, “for once the idea of a pink elephant is mentioned, it cannot be erased from one’s consciousness.” The paradox offers a heady if puzzling thematic conceit for the return of Arcade Fire with their seventh album, Pink Elephant. It gives the title track a clever rhetorical inversion: Front man Win Butler begs someone to have fun and stop worrying about him for a change while expressing love via an inability to take his mind off them, reinforcing dedication through attempts to fight it. The psych conundrum looms heavily over the first Arcade Fire project following a very public reputational upheaval. There is something we can’t stop thinking about, in spite of great effort, intruding on our perception of the art and the artist once seen as a scrappy successor to the statement-rock thrones of ’70s and ’80s titans like David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.

A Pitchfork report before their WE tour in fall 2022 uncovered multiple claims that Butler had wielded his influence and social-media presence to coerce young women into sex and to send them unwanted graphic texts during the late 2010s. His response offered an admission of infidelity and a string of rebuttals to each claim of misdoing. His wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, expressed faith in her husband and disbelief in the allegation that he had forced himself on one of his accusers: “I know what is in his heart, and I know he has never, and would never, touch a woman without her consent and I am certain he never did. He has lost his way and he has found his way back.” Beck and Feist quit the tour, but Juno and Grammy Awards nominations and festival engagements continued. A wave of disappointment washed over devotees; nevertheless, the tour beat on.

Ahead of Pink Elephant, the Montreal collective known for its insistent politics and uplifting lyricism was scarce and guarded in its direct communications. You could catch a breezy North American tour focusing on small venues or download the new Circle of Trust app to listen to Santa Pirata Radio, a podcast starring Butler and Chassagne. Outside of an appearance on SNL that tepidly re-created the guitar smashing of their 2007 debut on the show, the band has evaded opportunities to speak out. SNL might have been the only time you caught sight of them if you weren’t poking around Circle or posting up outside concert venue doors, where performances have spilled out into drum circles on the streets. It’s head-turning for the indie darlings who blossomed into festival headliners, award winners, and Billboard chart toppers. Their launches are typically loud and sometimes polarizing, clearing space for music that is endlessly if sometimes bristlingly exuberant: 2017’s Everything Now arrived amid a flurry of meta-commentary on negativity in social media, which Butler maintains is mischaracterized as snark; 2022’s bustling, hopeful WE enjoyed a battery of radio, podcast, and magazine chats. Now, what little frankness we get is limited to Arcade Fire’s places of power.

Pink Elephant steeps itself in themes of moving through tumult that feel informed by the challenge to Butler’s nobility and to our notion of the stability of the family bond at the root of Arcade Fire, while the band activity minimizes chances that possible sources of frustration come up. When we hear Butler or Chassagne sing or speak, it is of love and renewed commitment. “It’s the time of the season,” she whispers in the couples duet “Year of the Snake,” floating a Zombies reference that she quickly weaponizes, “when you think about leaving.” Her voice later drops out as Butler croons: “I tried to be good / But I’m a real boy / My heart’s full of love / It’s not made out of wood.”

When Butler shouts into the maelstrom of “Alien Nation” that he returns to unnamed enemies (his most fervent objectors being people who have questioned his character) the “pain they would like to or could have caused” him “with love,” it feels like Elephant is tacitly saying, “We’re not going away and we’re moving on.” The focus on romance in the lyrics conjures a world where John Lennon drops Double Fantasy right after stepping out on Yoko Ono in the early ’70s. The healing cart has jumped ahead of the reckoning horse. Arcade Fire wants to hurry back to warming hearts. This flies in the face of tour reports by the Montreal Gazette and Toronto Star capturing conflicted fans still trying to work out how to feel about the return of the band; one attendee conceded to the former that the current state of affairs is at least “less disturbing than J.K Rowling’s statements” about the trans community. The business-as-usual approach dovetails with a year of acts from Brand New to Ryan Adams looking to put a wide range of allegations of misconduct in the rearview mirror by giving diehards a show of talent to talk about instead and little else.

Working with Daniel Lanois, who ushered U2 and Peter Gabriel into their most danceable eras after early collaborations with Brian Eno, Arcade Fire forges a grittier and more claustrophobic sound than it did with WE, which tapped Radiohead regular Nigel Godrich to assist with labyrinthine, universalist two-parters. Auditory vastness and global ideas are reined in here. “Snake” and the title track float a slick marriage of roots rock and Pacific Northwest indie aesthetics — Butler claimed “mystical punk” and Venezuelan folk singer Simón Díaz as inspirations — but mounting genre experiments offer the grab-bag time displacement of a lunch hour on terrestrial rock radio. It’s all very studious: The dinky thud of the drums sometimes sounds like the band asking the producer for the Durutti Column special. The vocal and literary histrionics of “Circle of Trust” aim for the ache of the Cure’s “Disintegration” as the groove leans into bassy, amorous mid-’80s New Order. A line in “Ride or Die” — “I could die in your arms tonight” — gets surprisingly close to Cutting Crew. Arcade Fire is no stranger to such musical pockets. But Elephant’s succession of lovey-dovey throwback jams awards too much real estate to sounds of Gen-X wedding receptions and not nearly enough to zeroing in on newer directions. Circling back to the patient build of Funeral’s “Rebellion (Lies)” for Elephant closer “Stuck in My Head,” which bubbles to a frothy “Clean up your heart!,” the collective cruises to a 25th anniversary next year self-consciously retracing its own steps.

Elephant is hopepunk in the same way latter-day Chris Martin is; pastel hippie optics and earnestness that verges on cliché filter into songs that are several ticks less strange than what the wardrobe suggests. Dipping into time-tested dance-rock territory gives the album legs, but it’s often songs that drop the new shtick that hit hardest. Elephant’s worst track — “Alien Nation,” which resembles the Music or the Top Gear theme of the aughts — trips up in refitting Everything’s Luddite anomie to chunky electro-rock the band doesn’t sell well. The best avoids the pomp and playfulness. “Ride or Die” dreams of vanishing into another existence as the rock star says he wouldn’t mind working a nine-to-five as long as the love of his life could come with, his statement of affection flanked by choral echoes and reverb. The Arcade Fire now signaling defensiveness and solitude even in sound design luxuriate in space, and you lose a sense of how many people are in the room and which Hot 100 hits the producer engineered. But simplicity is just as often a liability for this album. The band behind the exhilarating and frustrating polyrhythmic jams on Reflektor and Everything Now loads Elephant with pared down trips to similar realms, dusted in gauzy, pretty noise but often lacking the lyrical and melodic gravitas these songs usually come with.

It feels like the band that wrote “My Body Is a Cage,” the glum and almost liturgical 2007 track that wormed its way into years of TV placements, boxed itself into an ideological corner where it speaks obliquely through new-wave and new-romantic ballads. The lack of acknowledgement of where things were left with the band after the Butler allegations haunts the album’s highlights and clunkers. The music is drenched in these and other contradictions. Is the sunny, scrappy “I Love Her Shadow” double-dipping in the Chinese-zodiac themes of love and reincarnation in “Snake” when Butler sings, “We never met but I remember who you are,” or are we left to think about how this sounds like a rock-star pickup line? What changed that got the band fixating on myths of shedding snakes? It’s difficult not to read Butler forgiving naysayers in the butt-rock song “Alien Nation” as anything other than a retort to anyone who expressed mistrust of this band; the gesture lands before an update on how he’s continuing to improve himself. It stings for vocal humanitarian advocates to clam up about misgivings pointed their own way. Even if the band feels like its cards were laid on the table years ago, and that’s why it hasn’t revisited the matter since, pushing a trust-themed social-media initiative warranted a check-in on how its stewardship of such spaces evolved in the wake of accusations of abuses of power. Increasingly, it feels like everything on the planet, even “Wake Up” and “No Cars Go,” is coated in the same milky film of unpleasantness, in the dissonance created by papering over a respected figure’s worst qualities to enjoy their best. In the year of the messy comeback tour struggling to distract us from some disconcerting elephant in the room, it’s too bad the surreptitiously uncanceled aren’t using their newfound freedom to be more forthright.