Elephant Stone // ASHA

Twenty years into Elephant Stone’s run, ASHA finds Rishi Dhir turning the band’s psychedelic vocabulary toward some of its heaviest material. Named for his late mother, whose name means “hope” in Sanskrit, the album holds grief, political unease, and spiritual searching inside arrangements that remain vivid rather than funereal. That tension gives ASHA its shape. “Everything Evil” is a compact proto-punk jolt, while “Fascists Killed Yer Rock ’N’ Roll” lurches forward on Sabbath-like guitar weight, with sitar threaded through tempo shifts as Dhir confronts the recurring threat of authoritarianism without pretending to offer easy answers. “I Got a Pill” wraps its unease in bright psych-pop, before the record turns increasingly inward through “Broken Arrow” and the reflective “A Beautiful Fate.” That tension comes into sharpest focus on “Parallel and Contrary Motion,” written in the shadow of personal loss and built around the strange space between grief and acceptance. From there, “Sleepwalking in Prague” drifts through a hazier dream state before “Spirit, Take Me Away,” featuring Amy Millan, stretches toward release. Produced, engineered, and mixed by Dhir at his Sacred Sounds studio in Montreal, ASHA draws freely from psychedelic rock, psych-pop, power pop, Indian classical music, and heavier rock traditions without feeling scattered. Instead, those colors serve a remarkably clear emotional purpose. The result is one of Elephant Stone’s most direct and human records, wounded but not defeated, searching for hope without pretending darkness has disappeared.