Hamilton Indie Rock Trio Ellevator Share New Music Video For “Star” Off Debut Full-Length

Hamilton, Ontario-based trio Ellevator released their debut full-length album earlier this month. Alongside the release of The Words You Spoke Still Move Me, the band also shared a music video for the album track and latest single, “STAR.”

Speaking about the new single, frontwoman Nabi Sue Bersche says: “There are so many ways to disguise ourselves I don’t think we even notice we’re dressing up anymore. Good art has a human point of view, which is to say it’s nuanced, complicated. It often doesn’t have a clear agenda that’s easily distilled, packaged, and sold. Flattening that perspective into something that fits neatly between the clean lines of social media has been difficult for me. Learning how to do it has changed the way I see the world, brought out ugly instincts, and magnified my vanity and insecurity. The wildest part is that this sort of curation and performance is no longer reserved for people like me: artists who pay people lots of money to convince you to listen to our music. Any fourteen-year-old on TikTok has given at least as much careful attention to their brand as I have. But the neurochemical trick these platforms play is just the latest version of a very old phenomenon. We’ve always built our identities carefully: showing the world our good side is an intrinsic part of evolution, whether it’s holding our arms high to make the bear think we’re bigger than we are or an Instagram story of our eight-car-garage.

Those initial introspective thoughts turned into a story about Sable Starr. “I started writing this song about [her] and the baby groupie scene from the 70s in West Hollywood,” continued Bersche. “Writing about licked lips, hey sweethearts, and other abstractions of crude men is a natural place for me to write from. Like a lot of people, there’s a deep well of rage to draw from there. But it morphed into a song about me, how the fucked up aspects of my industry have shaped me, how I’ve bent to the wills of people and entities I don’t trust. When the road runs out, will I be waiting around? Will I still be pretending?“

Alongside the single comes a the visual directed by the band’s frequent collaborator, Cam Veitch. Depicting the trio as various iterations of themselves, it hones in on the message underlying the track and emphasizes the lyrics. As Bersche sings about encounters with “teenage pretenders,” the various versions of the band flash across the screen, intersecting and overlapping, leading viewers to wonder what images might be real and which are the pretenders.

The band – made up of vocalist Nabi Sue Bersche, guitarist Tyler Bersche and bassist/synth player Elliott Gwynne – delivered the 12 track album as an anticipated follow up to their self-titled 2018 EP. The record is an emotionally charged collection of songs documenting various experiences ranging from universal (existential longing, romantic power struggles, the neverending work of true self-discovery) to highly specific (like frontwoman Bersche’s journey in extracting herself from a cult) storytelling. The end result is a hypnotic body of work, vulnerable and endearing at its core.

Canadian tour dates

05.18 – Ottawa, ON – w/ Annie Martel

05.19 – Montreal, QC – w/ Alicia Clara

05.20 – Oshawa, ON – w/ Equal + Quinn Mills

05.21 – Guelph, ON – w/ Emma Worley + Luvr

05.25 – St. Catharines, ON – w/ Lastli

05.26 – London, ON – w/ Deanna Petcoff

05.27 – Hamilton, ON – w/ Deanna Petcoff

05.28 – Toronto, ON – w/ Pleasure Craft

06.04 – Gravenhurst (Muskoka), ON – Tall Pines Music & Arts Festival