Approaching a new Elder release always sparks a certain unease. Not due to doubts about its quality, but from the vertigo of not knowing what direction a constantly mutating band will take. Over the last decade, their journey from monolithic doom/stoner to progressive rock, psychedelia, and space rock has been fascinating. Since Reflections of a Floating World (2017), each album has offered a different perspective on the same storm. That’s why their seventh full-length, Through Zero, surprises in the best way, as it is their most complete, mature, and cohesive album to date.
Without reinventing the wheel after Innate Passage (2022), the band has been refining its tools to achieve a greater impact, with the gift of making ten-minute songs flow with such dynamism that they seem to last half as long. Through Zero masters this art, blurring the lines between metallic, progressive, and electronic in a collision that evokes Hawkwind, Yes, and Kyuss.
The journey kicks off with «Sigil to Ruin», which recaptures the crunchy heaviness of their early years but wrapped in spatial atmospheres. This balance is solidified in «Capture & Release» and «Strata», where the “big riff” mentality is imposingly established. However, the big surprise lies in the synthesizers, which sound lush and psychedelic, as if the band has stopped apologizing for their Yes influences.
This instrumental growth runs parallel to Nick DiSalvo’s vocal maturity. His transition from the ragged tone of his early days to a cleaner register suffered some growing pains in the past, where the voice sometimes lost strength against the wall of sound. On Through Zero, DiSalvo sings with much more confidence in the spaces generated between the instrumental parts, which are the true protagonists of the show.
Towards the final stretch, the album makes the brave decision to pivot towards more intimate and exploratory territory, recapturing the warmth they already experimented with on The Gold & Silver Sessions. Instead of a textbook grandiloquent epic, the wonderful «Sight Unseen» offers a methodical construction that flirts with post-rock and krautrock. The album is capped off by «Blighted Age», a short track guided by acoustic guitars and light textures that channel classic psychedelia. For such a massive journey to close with such vulnerability is simply perfect.
In the end, all fears prove unfounded. Through Zero achieves something momentous and not so common in its genre, which is making us feel that, behind an undeniably grand and technical wall of sound, there are human hearts communicating real emotions. By unifying all their eras into a single body, Elder has surpassed all expectations and proves that, seven albums later, they remain a band capable of leaving us speechless.