Elephant Stone
ASHA
OUT AUGUST 28
CONTACT:
ROSIE BOYD // PUBLICIST
Rishi Dhir writes what he knows. In Elephant Stone, the Montreal psych-rock band he has helmed for twenty years, Dhir has woven stories of loss and grief, existential crisis and rebirth, and a world withering away—all set to elegant, intense, droning music. That voice, always searching, always honest about what it finds, is the constant. Everything else—the sonic textures, the instrumentation, the emotional register—has been in motion since the beginning.
Elephant Stone was born out of a need for refuge. Before the band, Dhir had spent years in the Montreal rock scene playing in The Datsons/The High Dials, burning through a decade of touring until the road had taken more than it gave. He found himself in a crisis of identity—unsure of what to do next, whether his work mattered, trying through all that darkness to reignite something. He picked up the sitar in 1997, an act that would quietly determine everything that followed.
In the mid-2000s, Dhir and his wife experienced loss through a miscarriage. That grief—alongside time spent in India—shaped The Seven Seas, Elephant Stone’s debut record in 2009. The album was critically acclaimed and longlisted for the Polaris Prize. It announced a songwriter who had found, through personal excavation, something worth sharing.
Those first two records were made in collaboration with producer Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes—a partnership that helped establish the band’s foundational sound. But Dhir was always moving toward the center of the process. By The Three Poisons in 2014, he had taken the reins on production; by Hollow, he was recording the band himself out of Sacred Sound, his home studio in Montreal; and by Le voyage de M. Lonely dans la lune, he was mixing as well. The studio auteur Elephant Stone would become was something Dhir grew into deliberately, one record at a time.
Elephant Stone’s self-titled sophomore record Elephant Stone in 2013 was the moment Dhir felt the band’s sound fully snap into focus—the most purely Elephant Stone record in the catalog, he has said. The Three Poisons followed in 2014, the first real pivot: a record that moved honestly through death and rebirth, Buddhist cycles of existence, and the idea of deconstruction as a form of renewal. It was the first of their records to be remixed—pulled apart and reassembled into something new.
Ship of Fools arrived in 2016 and pushed further still, embedding the band’s characteristic brooding in more modern, danceable textures. Where so much of their earlier work had leaned into the weight of what they were writing about, Ship of Fools found a way to make darkness move—sampling the sonic vocabularies of LCD Soundsystem and Isaac Hayes, proving that grief and groove are not opposites.
Through it all, Dhir has moved through the wider world of psych-rock as both a collaborator and a peer. As a sitarist, he has worked alongside Beck and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and his involvement in the psych-supergroup MIEN brought him into a creative circle that has fed back into Elephant Stone’s own work in ways both direct and oblique. The band—built around the longtime core of Dhir, drummer Miles Dupire, guitarist Robbie MacArthur, and multi-instrumentalist Jason Kent—has toured extensively across North America and Europe, playing in Canada, the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechia, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy.
By the time Hollow arrived, Elephant Stone had moved into explicitly conceptual territory: record that asked what it would mean for humanity to survive a dying planet. Side A charted the destruction; Side B imagined a way through. Dhir’s daughter appears on Hollow—a presence that made the stakes feel entirely personal.
Le voyage de M. Lonely dans la lune, the 2022 EP sung entirely in French, picked up where Hollow left off. A love letter to Montreal and to the French-speaking world the band has always felt close to, it followed a hermit named M. Lonely who retreats to the moon to escape a world suddenly crowded by others forced home—only to discover he was happier back on imperfect Earth, with all its imperfect people. The pandemic, as it did for so many, had given Dhir material he hadn’t asked for. He used it.
ASHA is the Sanskrit word for hope. It is also the name of Rishi Dhir’s late mother, who passed away during the writing and recording of what has become Elephant Stone’s tenth studio release. That loss—devastating, clarifying—sits at the center of everything here. ASHA is a meditation on grief, on the friction between sorrow and the stubborn persistence of hope, and on what it means to search for sanctuary within an increasingly dark world. It is the most personal record Dhir has made. And yet the album does not sound like a record in mourning. Where grief might have softened instincts, it seems to have sharpened them.
The lead single, “Everything Evil,” announced itself without apology—a sub-two-minute blast of proto-punk urgency, the most direct and aggressive thing the band had committed to tape. The second single goes further. “Fascists Killed Yer Rock ’N’ Roll” is something darker and heavier: a slow, suffocating march with a Black Sabbath-sized crunch at its core, guitar-driven and relentless, with subtle sitar woven through tempo shifts that keep the listener off balance.
Lyrically, it confronts the global rise of fascism with the unflinching authority of history—not protest-song rage, but a cold, clear-eyed reckoning. “You’d have to be living under a rock to ignore what’s happening,” says Dhir. “I don’t claim to have the answers; this song is about giving the threat a name. It’s a reminder that we’ve seen this script before... and we’ve overcome it before.”
ASHA as a whole moves between these registers—the urgency of the opening tracks giving way to darker, more expansive terrain, always balanced against Elephant Stone’s raga-rock foundations. The album closes with “Spirit, Take Me Away,” featuring Amy Millan (Stars / Broken Social Scene), and then—after a beat of silence—something else entirely: a voice memo Dhir recorded years earlier of his son Krish, then three years old, reciting a nonsense phrase he’d invented: “macca chacha singsing.” Dhir kept asking him to say it again. He kept saying it. It is the most unguarded moment on a record full of them—a reminder, after all the loss and the fury and the grief, that the world also contains this.
Produced, engineered, and mixed by Dhir at Sacred Sounds, ASHA is the work of a studio auteur at a defining moment. Twenty years in, the music has not mellowed. It has deepened.
“I only write about what I know and think I understand,” Dhir has said. “As long as there’s Rishi, there’s going to be Elephant Stone.”
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