Two decades into their existence, Elder remain an anomaly in the heavy underground - a band with the ability to absorb and shed influences from a myriad of genres without falling into pastiche or losing their identity. New album Through Zero is a reaffirmation of their commitment to pushing boundaries and cements their status as leaders in heavy psychedelic rock.
Elder has long since mastered crushing riffs, melodic jaunts, progressive patterns, hypnotic grooves and ethereal atmospherics. Recorded in Berlin between tours in 2025, Through Zero is possibly their most immediate and engaging record to date, allowing seeds from outside the sphere of rock music to take root and bloom within their progressive framework. Listeners will find new textures, sequences and sounds woven into Elder's endlessly bombastic take on heavy rock.
Elder was formed in a small coastal town in Massachusetts around 2006 by three longtime friends with a passion for downtuned heavy music. Over the years, the band has gained a guitarist, lost a drummer, relocated (mostly) from the United States 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.
"Through Zero" is a term borrowed from music engineering, which describes the property of a frequency being able to pass through the zero point and continue into the negative. While not a concept rooted in philosophy, it resonates on an existential level: the zero point is not an end, but a midpoint along a mostly unseeable path where the journey is the destination and reality is less linear than most of us understand.
