Elephant Stone have today released their new single and video titled ‘I Got A Pill’, from their upcoming album ‘ASHA’, dropping August 28th via Elephants On Parade, with limited edition signed and hand-numbered vinyl is available for pre-order now via Little Cloud Records.
Roughly twenty years into their journey, Elephant Stone still refuses to become another nostalgia act content to photocopy yesterday’s psychedelic playbook. ‘I Got A Pill’ feels like the work of musicians who have stared directly into the emotional blender, hit puree, and somehow walked away with sharper instincts instead of a therapy bill. The track wastes no time reminding everyone why the band continues to occupy its own peculiar corner of modern psych rock.
Rishi Dhir once again proves that his gift has never been about piling on exotic flourishes for the sake of aesthetics. His songwriting lets melody and atmosphere pull equal weight while the unmistakable thread of Indian musical influence slips naturally into every corner of the arrangement. Nothing feels forced. Nothing screams for attention. Confidence like this never has to. It simply walks into the room and lets lesser bands wonder what went wrong.
The rhythm section deserves plenty of credit for giving the song its heartbeat. Every groove pushes the track forward with understated precision while layers of shimmering guitars and hypnotic textures swirl around the vocals without collapsing into an overcaffeinated wall of effects. Plenty of psychedelic bands confuse reverb with personality. Elephant Stone continues to understand the difference.
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Lyrically, ‘I Got A Pill’ carries an emotional weight that lingers long after the final note. Coming from an album inspired by grief, hope, and personal loss, the song never slips into melodrama. Instead it embraces vulnerability with remarkable restraint, allowing its themes to surface through mood and nuance rather than oversized declarations. That balance gives the song an honesty that feels increasingly rare in a musical landscape addicted to shouting instead of saying something meaningful.
The accompanying video understands exactly what kind of song it is supporting. Every visual choice enhances the emotional pull without distracting from it, creating a dreamlike companion piece that mirrors the song’s shifting emotional landscape. Psychedelic imagery often ends up looking like a screensaver that escaped from 1998. This one actually serves the music, which is a refreshing concept that deserves more widespread adoption.
‘I Got A Pill’ stands as another compelling chapter in Elephant Stone’s already impressive catalog while hinting that the creative ceiling remains frustratingly out of reach. Ten albums in, most bands are busy selling anniversary box sets and pretending the best days are behind them. Elephant Stone appears far more interested in making that assumption look ridiculous. That is excellent news for anyone who still believes psychedelic rock has plenty of unexplored roads left to travel.
Featured image by Bowen Stead.
About Elephant Stone & ‘ASHA’
Frontman Rishi Dhir explains, “It’s about demagogues, the populist playbook. Leaders who feed on people’s fear and offer an easy fix. The pill. Take it and your problems go away. Except it doesn’t work like that. It’s control dressed up as relief.”
Directed by Adam Traynor and featuring handcrafted puppets by Diablo Puppets, the accompanying video embodies the song’s false promise of escape, inviting viewers into a surreal puppet world. Handmade and a little unhinged, characters Futzy, Radis, and Mascot lure the audience even deeper into the hypnotic, technicolor dreamscape, blurring the lines between comfort and control.
Adam Traynor says, “The lyrics to ‘I Got A Pill’ woo and warn all at once. I wanted to put the sweetness of that voice into the mouth of a Tony the Tiger-type mascot with a special breakfast gift for kids that would be sure to kick off a trip into a sugary Wonderland, a cardboard Oz, an awe-inducing game-world of artificial colors, a Dark Crystal quest for power, a Soylent Green feeding frenzy.”
‘I Got A Pill’ comes off ‘ASHA’, Elephant Stone’s 10th studio release via Elephants On Parade. Named after the late mother of frontman Rishi Dhir – ‘ASHA’ means “Hope” in Sanskrit – the album is a meditation on grief, hope, and the friction between sorrow and the darkness of these times. Limited edition signed and hand-numbered vinyl is available for pre-order now via Little Cloud Records.
At the heart of Montreal’s Elephant Stone is Rishi Dhir, a songwriter and sitarist who has spent twenty years blurring the lines between Western psych-pop and Indian classical tradition. What began in 2006 as a quest for transcendental sound has evolved into a singular, self-contained vision. Operating out of his Montreal home studio, Sacred Sounds, Dhir has emerged as a true studio auteur – producing, engineering, and mixing the band’s increasingly complex and cinematic output.
While the band’s reputation was built on airtight pop craftsmanship and spiritual exploration, their recent work – anchored by longtime members Miles Dupire, Robbie MacArthur, and Jason Kent – possesses a new, raw intensity. It is a sound forged through Dhir’s deep collaborative history with icons like The Black Angels, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Beck, as well as his role in the psych-supergroup MIEN.
With a discography spanning 10 acclaimed releases, Elephant Stone remains at the forefront of the modern movement, constantly deconstructing the past to find something visceral, haunting, and undeniably human in the present.
‘ASHA’ Tracklist
- 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 (ft. Amy Millan)
‘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.
LINKS:
https://elephantstone.ca/
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https://elephantstonemusic.bandcamp.com/
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https://youtube.com/elephantstone
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