SonicBlast in Conversation with Elder
Elder are yet another SonicBlast band that is marking their 20th year of existence in 2026, and even after all this time, they are still continuing to push boundaries and innovating. With a new album, ‘Through Zero’, just released last May, they have been tearing through stages with a revamped live lineup, and will hit our beloved festival at just the right time for a tight and surely unforgettable performance. Since it’s already their third visit to SonicBlast, they know what they’re getting into, and according to main man Nick DiSalvo, it’s just like a great day out among friends.
We’re lucky to have caught you during a little bit of rest from touring, you have done a lot of that recently, right? Being in Elder right now means playing a whole bunch of shows all the time, it seems.
Nick DiSalvo (guitars / vocals): Yeah, we’re kind of in the middle of a whole summer long tour that started in mid-June, we did about a month of it now, we have a little under two weeks off, and then we’ll go out again towards the end of this month, until SonicBlast essentially.
How have the shows been? You’re already playing a couple of songs off the new album ‘Through Zero’, have they changed the dynamic or the energy of your shows in any way?
Nick: We’re really pushing more of the new material at this moment, not just the latest record, but also some of the material we made in the past couple years, stuff that’s a little bit more proggy, more keyboard/synthesizer heavy. We’re also touring with our keyboard player again, who hasn’t joined us on stage since 2023. So yeah, the shows have been a bit different, as we want to make the most of having an extra set of hands, so we really put together a setlist that uses his strengths. It’s a lot of the stuff that’s… I don’t want to say ”keyboard heavy”, but you know, he’s not just sitting there twiddling his thumbs either. [laughs]
Is that a way to keep it exciting for you also? Also, is it a direction where you think the band might be heading in the future, more or less?
Nick: I’m not sure, right now I think it’s more a question that the newer stuff has a lot of layers that we can’t really do without resorting to backing tracks or something, which is not something this band does. Depending on what material we’re performing, oftentimes we have felt like we might not need another keyboard player, another person to help make this happen. But it’s obviously better to have them. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at figuring out how to work that into the live show as well. The first time we did it live with this lineup, on smaller stages, it was crowded, and it was sometimes a little confusing. But now it’s natural. It’s just like when it took us a little bit of time to readjust to having a second guitarist, when we added Michael to the band in 2017.
2026 is actually your 20th year as a band – how does that make you feel, looking back a bit and realising how far you’ve come?
Nick: We never had a plan, really. There wasn’t even a plan to make the band our main pursuit in life, so to say. When we say the band is twenty years old, that’s more or less the starting point of the band because we were still just high school students jamming together at that point. I think that was when we started writing material that would become the first Elder song. I don’t think there was ever a point when the band just “exploded,” we’ve just been steadily doing our thing and growing over the years. So everything feels a little startling when I look back and I think, shit, we have come a long way, we’re playing bigger stages and everything, but the growth has been very slow and steady, nothing has ever been too sudden or too jarring. It feels very natural. Now we’re quote unquote “professional musicians,” but we’re still the same people, and I hope we’re still doing it for the same reasons as back then.
Audiences can usually tell, when bands stop doing things for the “right” reasons, to put it like that. For a band on their seventh full-length album, your passion and your motivation seem clear from the outside too. It’s like it’s all coming from the same guts as before, right?
Nick: It really is, even if it’s also a very different thing now. I think back when we started the band, we were so excited to make our own music that it felt really fresh and exciting to us. We’re still doing that now, of course, but we also have a lot more resources and I think our modus operandi is a bit different too. When we go make a record now, we’re really trying to also make music that we love, but also really trying to outdo ourselves every time, in a certain way. Especially with this latest record, we spent the most time ever working on the recording and mixing and getting everything just right to that ideal point. We’ve grown a lot as our own producers and we’ve accumulated more knowledge of how it is to write and record music, so it’s also a nice challenge to make the records sound better and more layered and more interesting each time. It’s always fun, and it’s always a new challenge. We essentially keep trying to do something different, more than making it “better” or “worse”. I try not to even think of our music in those terms, because every record’s got its own kind of thing going on.
Yeah. it’s not a competition. So, the new album has been out now for a couple of months almost, you have probably gotten some feedback, even on the live shows and everything, so how is your perception of how it’s being received?
Nick: You know what, I feel like this has actually been the record that has been most warmly received by what I call both the “old” fans, since 2017’s ‘Reflections Of A Floating World’. What I mean by that, is the people who hopped on board when the band was more of a stoner rock thing, before we went in a more progressive direction. So, feedback has been great. I mean, we’re lucky to have a fan base in general. I guess that if people are listening to our music, they are already pretty open-minded. They have an attention span, and I think they appreciate being challenged as well, so they hope that there’s something new and exciting in each Elder record, even if it’s not always 100% their taste. So yeah, it’s been cool, and the critical reception has also been really good, we’re happy.
Do you feel that it is easier or harder, or just different, to write songs now as opposed to a few albums ago? Do you get the blank page effect more now, or does inspiration flow better?
Nick: When I try to make music and write a new song, I always want it to have its reason for existing. It always has to justify itself, if you know what I mean. I’m aware that a lot of my music might like sound self-referential or in some way similar, but my mind is always trying to make songs that bring something new to the table, that somewhat different, not just rehashing, not just copying myself. If I wanted to make a song that was very simple and formulaic, it would be extremely easy. I’ve written plenty of music over the years, I would know exactly how to do it. But the fact that the catalogue just keeps expanding and we always try to do something new and innovative, that makes it a lot more difficult. I think in the end it depends on what kind of music you want to make. If you’re just trying to shit out something, I think that would be very easy for us at this point. But if you’re trying to keep pushing your own creative boundaries, it’s natural that it becomes a lot more difficult over the years. But it’s not a great change either way, honestly. I think we’re better, so in that sense it’s actually easier, because we’re just better at our instruments, we know our tools better, that kind of thing.
You mentioned 2017 a couple of times in this conversation, and that was actually the year you first played SonicBlast. It was a different place back then, of course, and then you came back in 2023, so you will complete your hat-trick of SonicBlast appearances this year. What are your main memories of it? How does it feel to go back now?
Nick: Yeah, we felt it was a special place even from the very first time that we played there, I remember how the area was, it wasn’t quite on the beach, but it was also a very nice location, very sunny, we had a very warm reception, we were there for a couple of days. There were some pretty party-heavy moments there. [laughs] It feels like we’re always surrounded by friends there, there’s always bands around that we know from somewhere. The San Diego guys were around, the last time we played, I remember jumping in the water with Earthless’ Isaiah Mitchell just before the show, just enjoying the vibes. It’s a really nice place, it’s got this kind of vacation feeling for us, you know? It isn’t usual to play festivals that are on the beach, so aside from Duna Jam, which is obviously a completely different kind of thing, that’s pretty unique. Also, I feel the lineup has gotten almost “oversized” for the festival, you wouldn’t expect some of the bands they now get. SonicBlast now goes over the top with great lineups year after year, for a festival of that size, it’s almost like it’s really punching above its weight, in the best way possible, so that’s cool to see.
Are you expecting this show to be in the vein of the ones you have been playing for this summer tour?
Nick: Yeah, I would say that’s pretty much what we’re looking at. We’ve been on mostly a festival run anyway, so with the level of preparation it takes to put together enough songs to play for 90 minutes in some places and 30 minutes in some others, we’ve got everything we can do for this set, and we have got a pretty good idea of what we’re going to do for SonicBlast. I also think we’re getting tighter every time we play together, since we haven’t done that many shows as a five piece before, especially. With new material, it takes a minute for that to kind of gel live, but I think by the time we get there, it’s going to be a good performance.
We have good timing! So right now, even in the middle of all these shows, have you started thinking of the next thing? Or do you need a bit of time after putting out an album and going on tour before inspiration starts to strike again?
Nick: I haven’t really sat down to write any music since finishing the last record, but I have to say I’m thinking about it already. These last few days have been the first period in a long time where it hasn’t been all about writing, recording or rehearsing, so I’m starting to look at my guitars in the corner, thinking I can maybe start to try and write some music again. Going on tour and doing the whole thing a new record requires, I find that always somehow flips my mind again and gives me new inspiration and input. When you’re working on a record for so long and then you’re touring off of it, it’s like you’re just hyper-focused on that. It’s hard to for me to think about another creative pursuit. But I know by the time we finish that I’m usually ready to go again, ready to get back to that other part of the creative brain. I haven’t quite figured out what direction we’re going to go, but I am starting to think about it, yeah.
