Indie rock has always thrived on the fringes: small venues, tiny labels, and the slow-building careers that reward patience more than hype. Few contemporary bands embody this spirit better than Elephants and Stars, the Canadian band whose latest album, Under the Earth and Above Heaven, feels like the result of years dedicated to refining melody, guitar as truth, rock and roll meaning, and a hard-won optimism tempered with a slight sarcasm that comes from not taking oneself too seriously. A real understanding that life has ups and downs.

The album’s title suggests a band thinking about place, about being suspended between hardship and hope, about grounding themselves even as they reach. And in many ways, this duality captures the spirit of Elephants and Stars themselves: musicians who write like they’ve lived a little, but still believe that a good chorus can solve something in the soul. A great song can change the world.

Under the Earth and Above Heaven is, simply put, their most confident and emotionally resonant work to date. But the record is also a reminder of why rock, guitars, harmonies, and honest storytelling still matter.

The band behind the sound
To understand the record, it helps to understand the people who made it. Elephants and Stars operate in a tradition familiar to fans of early 2000s alternative rock: tight rhythm sections, guitars that shimmer and crunch, and lyrics that manage sincerity without slipping into sentimentality.

The lineup, anchored by frontman Manfred Sittmann, whose signature vocals blend warmth with a slight rasp, has solidified into a group whose interplay feels lived-in. Sittmann writes and sings with the clarity of someone who knows the exact weight of each line, but the band behind him keeps things agile rather than precious. Sittmann’s melodic instincts shape much of the band’s identity. He’s joined by Adam Seed, whose lead guitar work brings a sharp, expressive edge to their sound, and longtime collaborator Michael MacMillan, whose bass lines provide both structure, rhythm, and warmth. The rhythm section finds its heartbeat in drummer Stewart McKinney, while Simon Head expands the band’s sonic palette with textured, atmospheric keyboard layers. Together, they create a modern rock sound grounded in pop-punk roots. Music that’s unmistakably hook-driven yet designed with a clear mission: to help bring rock back to the forefront.

The band’s story stretches back years, especially for Sittmann and MacMillan, who previously played together in the excellent group Soap Opera. Their long creative history gives the songs on their latest release a natural chemistry and ease, the feeling of musicians who know exactly how to respond to one another. That chemistry reaches a new peak on Under the Earth and Above Heaven, released in February of this year and produced by Ian Blurton, a collaboration that sharpens their sound while preserving the emotional immediacy that defines their work.

The guitars, often handled in layered pairs, move between bright open-chord passages and more aggressive leads. The bass lines are melodic without overpowering the mix, and the drumming is purposeful and punchy where it should be, restrained where the lyrics need breathing room. The result is a sound built on chemistry rather than simply studio polish.

The band feels like a cohort of people who know how to play to each other’s strengths. This matters because Under the Earth and Above Heaven is an album that depends on emotional pacing: crescendos that feel earned, shifts in tone that feel organic, and choruses that arrive with the momentum of a live show.

A sound defined by uplift without naïveté
From the opening track, Elephants and Stars make it clear that they are uninterested in the cynicism that often dominates modern rock. Their guitars ring with a kind of unguarded cascade of sonic joy, even when the lyrics are wrestling with frustration or loss. One of the most striking qualities of this album is how hope and melancholy coexist—not in competition, but in conversation.

The production leans into this duality. Vocals sit slightly forward in the mix, giving Sittmann’s storytelling a sense of directness and intimacy. The guitars, meanwhile, expand outward: wide, textured, layered. It’s the kind of sound associated with late-afternoon festival sets—sunlight still visible, the air cooling, the crowd settling into a collective feeling. And the sound? Loud, propulsive, aggressive, like a sonic caress.

What keeps the record from drifting into nostalgia is the band’s sense of precision. Each song feels built, not merely written. The hooks land with purpose. The bridges feel like necessary expansions, not detours. And the choruses—Elephants and Stars’ greatest strength—arrive like emotional confirmations.
This is a band that believes in melody the way some bands believe in distortion pedals: as the emotional engine of the music.

The lyrical world of the album
If the sound carries the emotional lift, the lyrics provide the grounding. Under the Earth and Above Heaven reads like a record about transition—moving from one stage of life to another, reconciling who you were with who you’re trying to become. The “earth” and “heaven” of the title function less as metaphysical spaces and more as metaphors for the pressures we carry and the aspirations we hold. Across the record, recurring themes emerge.

Across Under the Earth and Above Heaven, Elephants and Stars weave a thematic through-line that feels both deeply personal and universally readable. The record begins by making peace with the past, returning again and again to the bittersweet truth that old mistakes never quite vanish. Yet the band refuses to sink into regret. Instead, they treat memory like an old photograph—something to regard with a mix of tenderness and hard-earned gratitude for having made it through. That reflective stance sets the stage for one of the album’s central concerns: the search for steadiness in a world that rarely offers it. Life, as their lyrics suggest, often feels precarious, a suspended moment in which you’re “almost there” but never fully settled. But rather than express anxiety, the band leans toward determination, riding out the instability with resolve.

That determination is buoyed by another recurring insight: the importance of connection. Throughout the album, relationships of all kinds—romantic partners, close friends, the communities we build around ourselves—appear as the forces that keep us grounded. These songs push against the temptation to withdraw, insisting instead that meaning comes from being in the world with others. And within that engagement, the band finds flashes of transcendence in the most ordinary places: singing in the car, watching the sunrise after a sleepless night, catching the sound of someone’s laughter at just the right moment. These quiet, luminous details echo the “above heaven” imagery of the album’s title, suggesting that the extraordinary often reveals itself in the spaces where we least expect it.

The record carries an autobiographical weight without tipping into confession. Rather than offering a straightforward personal narrative, it gestures toward shared emotional terrain—less “here is my story” and more “here is a feeling you have probably known.” And while a full song-by-song analysis would exceed the scope of this discussion, several tracks stand out for the way they shape the album’s emotional arc, guiding listeners through reflection, uncertainty, connection, and ultimately the little but meaningful possibilities of joy.

The opener: urgency with clarity
The opening track, The Ceiling, wastes no time establishing the album’s stakes. A driving beat, guitars that arrive fully formed, and lyrics that describe the moment when indecision becomes action. It feels like a thesis statement: the band is not here to wallow; they are here to move. A bit more than midway through the record comes a standout track that shifts the tempo and deepens the tone, ‘Unlucky.’ This is where the band’s lyrical strengths shine: reflections on resilience, the cost of growth, and the quiet strength found in simply continuing. The arrangement builds around a groove—guitar, sway in the keyboards, more subtle percussion, then a full electric swell—mirroring the emotional climb.

The late-album surge: an anthem of uplift
As the album nears its conclusion, the band leans into one of their most triumphant choruses to date on ‘Paint Me Alive’. It’s the kind of moment designed to be shouted back at the stage, hands in the air, the kind of collective catharsis that only rock music can produce. The lyrics, which center on choosing light even when darkness is familiar, feel earned precisely because the album has carried listeners through doubt and tension.

The final track, The Ghosts, does something rare: it provides closure without collapsing into tidy resolution. It acknowledges the uncertainties that remain but offers a melodic reassurance that moving forward—however imperfectly—is worth celebrating.

Three elements make Under the Earth and Above Heaven one of Elephants and Stars’ most compelling releases: 1) Musical consistency without monotony. 2) The band has refined their sound without becoming predictable. And 3) Each song feels connected to the whole, but no two entries collapse into each other.

Emotional honesty that creates community
In an era where irony often dominates indie music discourse, Elephants and Stars commit wholeheartedly to sincerity. Their stories are earnest but never naive. The band creates A sense of community embedded in the music. Listening to the album feels like being welcomed into a shared emotional space. It’s personal, but it’s not private.

Elephants and Stars occupy an interesting place in today’s musical world. They are neither trend-chasers nor purists. Instead, they carry forward the tradition of emotionally articulate guitar rock: bands like The Weakerthans, early Jimmy Eat World, or mid-period The Hold Steady—artists who treat songwriting as craft rather than marketing. Their music reminds listeners that rock still has a role to play in articulating everyday emotional life. Not the grand dramas, but the subtle struggles: trying to be better, trying to stay hopeful, trying to find footing. In a digital era marked by fragmentation and fatigue, Under the Earth and Above Heaven feels refreshingly grounded.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the album is its replayability. The first listen offers immediacy—hooks that land, choruses that stick. But subsequent listens reveal the details: the way a harmony hangs in the background, the way a guitar line subtly echoes a lyrical theme, the way the rhythm section builds tension without overstating it. This is music built not just to impress, but to accompany. It is the kind of record listeners grow with and discover far more over repeated listens.

An album for the moment we’re in
Under the Earth and Above Heaven succeeds because it feels like an album made by people committed to the power of song—not spectacle, not persona, but the craft of building moments of connection. In a fractured cultural moment, that feels almost radical.

Elephants and Stars may never be the kind of band that dominates streaming algorithms or headlines massive festivals. But this record demonstrates why they matter: they make music that sees listeners clearly. They make music that names the feelings many of us carry. They make music that reaches upward, outward, toward one another.

And sometimes, that’s exactly what good rock music is supposed to do.