Elephant Tree: Grounding Doom

It’s been four years and many beautiful coloured album re-presses since ELEPHANT TREE released their self-titled album. A trance-inducing work of stoner doom that cemented and grew a loyal fanbase, growing beyond their debut EP Theia into their own sound. Now Habits is released, a shimmering promise of psychedelic doom, with no small weight of expectation.

Elephant Tree, the follow up to mythically-themed Theia, was an album much more grounded in reality than it’s bluesy stoner musical elements might indicate. Habits continues in this vein to explore the world as we know it, but where the self-titled release was rooted in fiction, this album is a much more personal form of storytelling. “With the theme of the album, we wanted to make it into a look on life and how growing up in the current climate at the minute and the way things are is that you can’t always control everything, and there’s a lot of things expected of you,” explains drummer Sam Hart. “It’s something that we’ve always kind of felt and understood.”

Bleakness is certainly a feature in Habits – beautiful harmonies and often uplifting melodies are accompanied by dark and painful lyrics centering on loss and loneliness, regret and death. “There were difficult times for some of us and things that we were going through like family losses and other things like that, breakups, all sorts of things and it was trying to put that into a perspective where it wasn’t personal for any one of us, but it was things that you would expect in anyone’s life.”

This album cycle hasn’t just brought more professionalism to the recording process. Any followers of ELEPHANT TREE on social media will have noticed the change in tone to posts and share content – a scroll through their Facebook page shows scattered shares of blog posts replaced with Spotify playlists and thematically unified artwork. “The whole thing came about because we’ve worked quite a lot over the last year with a French woman called Beth [Vandeven] who’s kind of our tour manager/gig manager. But it got to the point where every time we saw her it was the words ‘I hate that fucking weasel’. She kind of drilled home and pointed out to us that we were getting to the point now where it seems a bit silly to have a different font on everything that we had and different images, and the weasel. She said it’s funny for us because of the in-jokes behind it, but not everyone else gets the joke as to why everything has a weasel and pictures of ham in it.”

For a band who repeatedly sell out limited runs of vinyl represses and with a solid core fanbase it’s sometimes surprising to see ELEPHANT TREE still appearing in some of the smallest venues in London. “We find it very difficult to say no to stuff, so we do end up playing quite a lot of the smaller venues and things because we know the people that are there. When we were starting out seven years ago it was a case of these guys taking a gamble on us and putting our gigs on, so now we’re returning the favour almost – not that they necessarily need it! Obviously we’d like to play the bigger venues, we did have a bit of a plan for doing something that is still up in the air at the moment but was planned for around the end of June. Obviously with COVID-19 and everything kicking in, I’m 90% sure that all that is going to be postponed now to at least November, most likely into next year.”

It is now unavoidable to discuss an album release without mentioning the immense disruption created by the outbreak of COVID-19. Unthinkable only a month or two ago, the lockdown orders imposed in many countries has led to waves upon waves of cancelled or postponed shows and festivals. The impact of lockdowns worldwide has been felt beyond just live music – album releases have been postponed by artists across the industry spectrum. For ELEPHANT TREE, with the first single of the album released in January, this wasn’t an option. “There wasn’t ever a discussion of whether we should move it not. We’d pushed ahead with the single releases and now it’s not really hampering albums being released. I think we’re really lucky to have the kind of fanbase that we do have – they understand. So in that respect there wasn’t any change of plans to any of the release schedules other than cancelling the live listening parties and the live shows.”

The more reality-centred songwriting is likely here to stay, at least for the next album, with a return to fantasy writing or forays into power-metal all but ruled out. “There’s people that do it 1000 times better than we could ever do it. Also, we don’t like singing about the whole culture around ‘oh yeah we smoke loads of weed’ or ‘we drink loads of booze’. It wouldn’t feel right for us to sing about those kind of subjects without doing it ourselves. I think we’re just going to keep it as it is for now, more grounded. Hopefully that resonates with some people as well.”

Habits is out now via Holy Roar Records. 

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