Battle Elf: 10

If there’s one thing that’s already written in the stars this year, it’s that Battle Elf will claim the moniker of 2025. A name that was probably coined after a session on beer and grass rather than any business meetings around the table, their name alone reveals a key part to the story.

Spearheaded by Infinite River’s Gretchen Gonzales, the Detroit underground veteran is joined by psych kindred spirits, guitarist Chris Peters (Racehorses Are Resources), and drummer, David Hurley (Panto Collapsar).

On Battle Elf’s debut long-player, 10, the trio draws the mind to new places. While Gonzales’ krautrock voyage alongside Joey Mazzola and Warren Defever as Infinite River has been one through the milieu of a stoned, green haze, Battle Elf is more about the psychedelic trip. Sound with wild colours, and via a communication through the world of improvisation, the trio pull apart music language to find new space and meaning within it.

While the echoes of Can and Ash Ra Tempel are distant, Battle Elf create a new form a danger within the psychedelic free-form paradigm, and it begins with Behind the Wilderness. Something inspired by their native Detroit, it starts with a wall of noise bleeding through the amps like diesel from a leaky generator. Hurley’s drums feel their way around the room as searching guitar interplay between Gonzales and Peters starts off as more of a hypnotic bass chug. It slowly unfurls as noise rings through the orbits – Gonzales splintering off with a series of squiggly guitar lines that scratch across the canvass.

Following is Hotel Jerome – a cerebral, tin can clatter with disjointed plinking and fractured percussion that forms demented shapes that squeeze out of the speakers. It’s something more “inner ear”, riding along a frequency that leads all the way to the mind’s core.

With a bristling pulse that travels deep into the ire of krautrock, on Stops Pretty Places, Battle Elf find themselves flexing their inner TNT. There’s added hot sauce here, though, as Gonzales and Peters push against Hurley’s cannon-like percussion, together the trio take improvisation to perilous places.

And Battle Elf remain there on final cut, Yasmeen. Hurley, once again leading the charge as Gonzales and Peters follow his lead with interlocking patterns, resulting in a psych-jazz freak-out that burns across the fault lines. It reaches 10’s logical conclusion. The flames, reduced to embers, and as a hush descends over this gnarly racket, the composition ends with a comedown-like effect.

To reach 10’s core, one really needs it in their ears. A pure headphones crusade, and while the term psychedelia is exploited by so many, like Infinite River before them, Battle Elf harbours a deeper intelligence of the movement. And through a heady alchemy of heavy grooves and sonic mind fuckery, the trio just about reach its ultimate endpoint.

10 is out now via Birdman Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.