Lord Elephant come from Florence and have been making instrumental heavy psych since 2016. Their second full-length, Ultra Soul, is a seven-track slab of doom, blues, stoner rock and psychedelic wandering, released through Heavy Psych Sounds.
The big difference from their debut Cosmic Awakening seems to be experience. The band have spent a lot of time on the road since then, including shows with Eyehategod, Church Of Misery, Nebula, Bongzilla and Weedeater, and Ultra Soul has that feeling of a band which has learned how to make the three-piece format work properly.
There’s plenty of fuzz, obviously, but the bass and drums are doing much more than simply holding the guitar up. The longer passages have room to move around, and the guitar can disappear into a blues lick or some spaced-out psychedelic section without the whole thing falling apart.
“Gigantia” is probably the best example of this. It’s roomy, loose and heavy without sounding like the band are trying to prove how heavy they are. “MindNight” takes the longer route, starting from doom and wandering into more psychedelic territory. These are the moments where the album really comes alive.
The production may be a different story depending on how much dirt you like in your doom.
The sound is pretty fucking thick. Sometimes too thick. The bass, guitar and drums can end up sitting on top of each other, especially when the fuzz really kicks in, and a few of the heavier sections lose some detail because of it. I don’t need doom to sound clean and polished, but there are places here where I wanted to hear the riffs a bit better.
Then the last track comes along and changes the picture. “Leave This World With Me” is much more open, with cleaner guitar and plenty of air around it. After all that weight, it works surprisingly well. It also makes you wonder whether the band could have pushed that side of their sound a little further elsewhere on the album.
Nobody is going to mistake Ultra Soul for some revolutionary new take on psychedelic doom. The ingredients are familiar and Lord Elephant aren’t hiding that. Blues, stoner rock, doom, heavy psych – they’ve been through all of it before, and so have plenty of other bands. What matters is whether the three guys can make those ingredients worth listening to.
They can.
The band sound more confident than they did on the debut, and the years of playing live seem to have done them some good. There is more muscle in the riffs and more purpose behind the longer jams. It still sounds like Lord Elephant rather than a band trying to tick every box in the Heavy Psych Sounds catalogue.
For me, that’s where Ultra Soul works best. It’s a solid second album from a band that has clearly put some miles behind it. Nothing here is going to turn the doom scene upside down, but there’s enough good riffing and enough room for the songs to breathe that I can easily see this record working even better at full volume in a sweaty club.
And really, that’s probably where Lord Elephant belong.
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Released by Heavy Psych Sounds on January 30th, 2026
