Elephant Stone announce ‘ASHA’ — and lead single ‘Everything Evil’ is two mins of pure fire

Montreal psych-rock veterans Elephant Stone are back with their tenth studio album, and they’re not easing you in gently. ’ASHA,’ due August 28, 2026 via Elephants On Parade/Little Cloud Records, arrives alongside lead single and video Everything Evil — a sub-two-minute proto-psych-punk missile that’s over almost before you know what hit you.

The album’s title carries real weight. ASHA is the Sanskrit word for “hope,” and it’s named after the late mother of frontman, sitarist, and songwriter Rishi Dhir, who passed away earlier this year. Written and recorded in the aftermath of that loss, the record is a meditation on grief — the kind that doesn’t resolve neatly, that lives in the friction between sorrow and something that might, eventually, look like hope.

Everything Evil is a deliberate gut-punch of an opening statement. “I wanted to come out of the door swinging,” Dhir says. “It feels like there’s a lot of evil in the world right now, and ‘Everything Evil’ is a direct response to that — it’s short, it’s angry, and it gets straight to the point.” Raw, hooky, and ruthlessly efficient, it signals a band that has something urgent to say and zero patience for softening it.

The single, though, is only one face of ‘ASHA’. The album opens with the hypnotic Here Comes The Rising Sun and closes with the ethereal Spirit, Take Me Away, featuring a guest turn from Amy Millan (Stars / Broken Social Scene). In between, tracks like the forthcoming Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘N’ Roll suggest a record that balances Elephant Stone’s signature raga-rock DNA with a new, hard-won urgency.

As always, Dhir produced, engineered, and mixed the whole thing himself at his Montreal home studio, Sacred Sound — a true auteur move from a guy who’s spent two decades blurring Western psych-pop with Indian classical tradition, and who’s racked up a collaborative history that includes The Black Angels, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Beck, and the psych-supergroup MIEN.

Limited-edition vinyl is available for pre-order now via Little Cloud Records.

’ASHA’ track list:
1. Here Comes The Rising Sun
2. Everything Evil
3. Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘N’ Roll
4. I Got A Pill
5. Broken Arrow
6. A Beautiful Fate
7. Parallel And Contrary Motion
8. Sleepwalking In Prague
9. Spirit, Take Me Away (feat. Amy Millan)

Pre-order ’ASHA’ on vinyl via Little Cloud Records

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