Music
Progressive rock trio Elder headline The Gov with Melbourne's Khan in support
Tuesday 18 May 2027The Gov
Massachusetts-born progressive rock band Elder return to Australia for their first headline tour since 2015, playing The Gov on 18 May 2027 to support new album Through Zero. Melbourne stoner rock outfit Khan opens all dates, with doors at 7:30pm and tickets $81 plus booking fee.
Elder haven't toured Australia since 2015, when they played alongside Earthless. Twelve years on, the Massachusetts-born, now Germany-based progressive rock trio return with a new album and a support slot from Melbourne stoner rock outfit Khan across all dates, including a stop at The Gov on 18 May 2027.
The new record, Through Zero, arrives via Adelaide label Bird's Robe. It's a notable step for the band: the first album they've produced and co-mixed themselves, working alongside longtime collaborator Richard Behrens. Recorded in Berlin across 2025 in the gaps between tours, it carries the crushing riffs, progressive shifts and hypnotic groove Elder have spent two decades refining, while pulling in textures and sequences that sit outside rock's usual toolkit.
Band member Nick DiSalvo has said the album's title comes from engineering terminology, describing a frequency passing through zero into the negative. He's framed it as a metaphor for a midpoint along an unseen path, with the record moving through themes of life and death, frustration and hope. It's the kind of conceptual grounding that's typical of Elder, a band that treats heaviness as a starting point rather than an endpoint.
Founded around 2006 on the Massachusetts coast, Elder have built a catalogue of six full-length albums, four EPs and two live records. Lineup changes and an eventual relocation to Germany haven't knocked them off course. If anything, they've used those shifts to keep absorbing new influences without losing the throughline that makes them Elder rather than any of the countless bands working similar heavy psychedelic territory.
For Adelaide fans who've waited over a decade for a headline show, this is a chance to hear that evolution firsthand. Doors at The Gov open at 7:30pm on 18 May 2027, with tickets priced at $81 plus booking fee. Khan will open across the tour, bringing their own strain of Melbourne stoner rock to the bill.
Elder have never been a band content to repeat themselves, and Through Zero sounds like another deliberate step outward. For anyone who caught them back in 2015, or has only known them through records since, this tour is worth the wait.
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