Elephant Stone have announced their 10th studio album, ‘ASHA’, due August 28 via Elephants On Parade/Little Cloud Records, and the lead single “Everything Evil” arrives as one of the most direct and aggressive things Montreal’s Rishi Dhir has ever committed to tape. A sub-two-minute proto-psych-punk blast, raw and hooky and over before you’ve caught your breath, it sets the tone for an album that carries enormous personal weight. ‘ASHA’ is the Sanskrit word for “Hope,” and the record is named after Dhir’s late mother, who passed away earlier this year. “It feels like there’s a lot of evil in the world right now,” says Dhir, “and ‘Everything Evil’ is a direct response to that — it’s short, it’s angry, and it gets straight to the point.”
The album moves through darker and more expansive terrain than the single suggests, balancing Elephant Stone’s signature raga-rock foundations with a newfound urgency born from grief. It opens with the hypnotic “Here Comes The Rising Sun” and closes with the ethereal “Spirit, Take Me Away,” featuring a guest appearance from Amy Millan of Stars and Broken Social Scene. Produced, engineered, and mixed entirely by Dhir at his Montreal home studio, Sacred Sound, ‘ASHA’ draws on two decades of blurring Western psych-pop with Indian classical tradition and a collaborative history that includes The Black Angels, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Beck, and his role in psych-supergroup MIEN.
This is an album made at a defining moment in an artist’s life, and it sounds exactly like that. Limited-edition vinyl is available for pre-order now via Little Cloud Records.
‘ASHA’ Track Listing:
- Here Comes The Rising Sun
- Everything Evil
- Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘N’ Roll
- I Got A Pill
- Broken Arrow
- A Beautiful Fate
- Parallel And Contrary Motion
- Sleepwalking In Prague
- Spirit, Take Me Away (feat. Amy Millan)