Elegant Elephant are an alternative rock band from Stockholm, Sweden, formed in early 2017, consisting of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Christoffer Parning Finnson, bassist John Dayao, and drummer Marco Giulini. I caught up with the band to find out about their influences, goals, and the possible struggles of starting a band in the modern-day music industry.
“We’ve all been playing in bands and so on since our teens”, guitarist Christoff states, discussing how the band first got into writing and playing music. “This led us to experiment with writing our own material in different ways, and then our paths met at an audio engineering school in 2015.” The band have recently released their first single ‘Cogwheel’. Almost psychedelic-esque, Elegant Elephant have an obscure yet addictive sound, likening to bands such as King Gizzard and Tame Impala, the latter being one of the band’s inspirations.
Other artists the band named as inspirations include Royal Blood, Radiohead, and Knower. “There are so many good acts to choose from”, Christoff added, “we’ve also been excited about a lot of the more experimental soundtracks of series this last year.” The band also discussed how their influences span across multiple genres, “We love the clean and tight productions on a lot of modern pop, but also the kind of raw grittiness that can be found in rock – and although it’s further from our genre, we can also get really inspired by the complex harmonics of jazz and classical, or the ambience and atmospheric quality in electronic and cinematic music.”
With the music industry and habits of listeners constantly changing, is it harder for new bands to thrive? Christoff explained how some aspects are easier than others: “We think it might be easier to reach a large number of people nowadays, with social media, forums and so on – and also, it’s much cheaper to record these days. So maybe it’s a bit less complicated to get a new project going today than say 20 or 30 years ago. On the other hand, it has become more difficult to earn anything on your music if you’re not touring. What you’re left with is basically merch and streaming money, which doesn’t add up to much as a small band. So to summarize, I guess you could say that it’s easier to make music today, but it’s harder making money off of the music you’ve made.”
Currently, the band are working on some new tracks which are to be released in the next couple of months – as for the future, Christoff stated “At this point, we feel like it’s too early to know what to expect. But we’d definitely like to get out and play more concerts, and we plan on continue writing and releasing new material.
One thing for certain, Elegant Elephant bring a rivetingly cool sound to the alt-rock genre, and deservedly should make a big name for themselves.
LDOI 