VELVET THUNDER

This lot fascinate me! – two decades into their existence, Elder remain a complete anomaly in the underground rock scene – a rare band with the ability to absorb and shed influences from a myriad of genres without falling into pastiche or losing their own identity. Their new album Through Zero is a strong reaffirmation of a commitment to pushing boundaries in the world of heavy rock and cements the group’s status as one of the leaders of the pack in heavy psychedelic rock.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Elder were Australian, purveyors of that whole desert / psych-rock scene from Down Under. In fact, Elder was founded sometime around 2006 (or thereabouts – nobody remembers exactly…) in a small coastal town in Massachusetts by three long-time friends with a passion for heavy down-tuned music. Over the years, the band has gained a guitarist, lost a drummer, relocated (mostly) from the US to Germany, played hundreds of shows from small clubs to arenas across the world and released six full-length albums, four EPs and two live records. Though this pedigree isn’t a requirement for anything, the twists and turns along the group’s winding road to today might explain the group’s refusal to stagnate.

Elder has long since mastered crushing riffs, melodic jaunts, progressive patterns, hypnotic grooves and ethereal atmosphere along their path of music-making in the past twenty years.

On Through Zero, Elder takes these years of experience and forms possibly their most immediate and engaging record to date, while allowing seeds from outside the sphere of rock music to take root and bloom within their progressive framework.

Listeners will find familiar elements of new textures, sequences, and sounds alongside Elder’s iconic take on heavy rock. As always, every spin reveals new details.

Recorded in Berlin across several months between tours in 2025, Through Zero is the first album which the band not only produced but also co-mixed together with longtime collaborator Richard Behrens. The album sounds more like a full extension of the band’s creative intentions than ever before.

Guitarist and singer Nick DiSalvo comments: “Through Zero is a term borrowed from engineering and the world of music. It describes the property of a frequency being able to pass through the zero point and continue into the negative. While it isn’t a concept rooted in philosophy, it resonates with me on a conceptual level: the zero point is not an end, but a midpoint along a partially unseen path. Interpretation is open: the journey is the destination, beginnings and endings may be arbitrary, or perhaps reality is simply less linear than we tend to assume. The songs on the album explore related themes that reflect my own observations and personal philosophy. Life and death, frustration and fear, helplessness and hope — all of these exist along the same “signal path.”….” So there you have it!

On with the music – none of these tracks are brief, although I don’t suppose fans will be expecting anything different length-wise, they’ve always been quite Proggy in that sense! We open with Sigil To Ruin, immediately immersed in those richly overlapping layers of swirling keys, hypnotic guitars and bass, groovy syncopation and dreamy, floating vocals, the whole combining to give that mesmeric, organically building composition that melds so many styles. I read someone somewhere saying that some bands can make a three-minute track feel like eight minutes, whereas Elder make an eight-minute track sail past in what feels like three minutes…they remind of that whole school of “Aussie desert / psych- rock” that all espouse that pacey yet languid, massively melodic, totally immersive sound – and Elder are Top Of The Class in that regard!

There’s nothing languid about the next one, Capture/Release is an energetic, beast of a number – check out the video below. I think the video illustrates just what dexterous players these guys are, mercilessly driving a frenetic rhythm with unerring accuracy to create a totally hypnotic number that simply flies by…

Not to be out-done, the title track Through Zero (listen to the YouTube track below) ramps up the heaviness quite mightily, launching into a great big meaty slab of psych-rock. A bridge section brings a nice change of mood before we dive back into the densely swirling chords.

At a smidge under 11 minutes, Strata is the longest track on the album and as such is a mighty composition, “proggy” and orchestral in its approach. Banks of fuzzed guitars underpin a simple clean-cut keyboard line, before a more energetic riff takes over. The drumming is full-tilt, as is the loping bass-line. The riff gets more and more hyper, reaching higher and higher levels (appropriately I guess!), the sound building and building before the next “movement” comes in – this is where the orchestral element of the arrangement manifests itself. We’re then into an almost Quo-like chugg-along. The whole is beautifully produced, bathing you in sonic bliss!

This last epic morphs quite gently into Sight Unseen, a serene opening on keys augmented by sparse, clean guitar licks where you savour every note. Elder have this knack, I guess inherent across what one might call the “psych-prog” genre, to almost imperceptibly develop tracks, building layer on layer, adding depth and emotion without clutter, repetition without becoming stale, This one’s an instrumental, and vocals would I think be a distraction from the crescendo that is building. All credit to the mix by Richard Behrens and Elder themselves, together with the Mastering by Carl Saff – meaty stuff!

Blighted Age starts from a different place, acoustic guitars and a pastoral feel to the vocals. A different approach to the percussion adds to the attraction. Such a clean sound, again you savour every note, these guys are genuinely creative. There’s a hint of Porcupine Tree about the clean, subtly shifting rhythms on display here, a truly satisfying piece of music as it fades into the ether……and breathe!

The craftmanship on display here is superb, you know there ain’t a note out of place even during the sustained roller-coaster sections of music. Prog, heavy rock, psych-rock, desert rock, there’s a slab of all this and much more in this tasty selection. Try for yourselves!

Have another slice!