The full-length debut from alt-rock band Ellevator, The Words You Spoke Still Move Me inhabits an emotional landscape both breathtakingly intimate and impossibly vast. Over the course of 12 incandescent songs, the Ontario-based trio document experiences at turns universal (existential longing, romantic power struggles, the neverending work of true self-discovery) and highly specific (e.g., frontwoman Nabi Sue Bersche’s journey in extracting herself from a cult). When met with their warm yet mercurial sound and transportive storytelling, the result is a truly hypnotic body of work, giving rise to the kind of radiant open-heartedness that radically transforms our own perspective.

Produced by indie-rock luminary Chris Walla—former guitarist and founding member of Death Cab for Cutie, and a major creative force in that band as well as critically revered, genre-defining acts like The Long Winters—The Words You Spoke Still Move Me bears a stunning effervescence that startled even Ellevator itself. “When we started writing we were making a lot of dark, angry music with these very heavy lyrics about Greek tragedies,” notes guitarist Tyler Bersche, whose bandmates also include bassist/keyboardist Elliott Gwynne (a childhood friend of both Tyler and Nabi, a married couple). Longtime collaborators originally from the town of Guelph, the three musicians had initially leaned into certain moodier sensibilities largely influenced by their post-rock pedigree, but soon found themselves revisiting the exultant art-pop of artists like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Along with introducing bold new textures and timbres into their sonic vocabulary, Ellevator chose to expunge any ironic detachment from their songwriting, fiercely committing to an all-encompassing sincerity that leaves plenty of room for gentle irreverence, self-aware humor, and unbridled joy.

The follow-up to their 2018 self-titled debut EP, The Words You Spoke Still Move Me draws much of its immersive power from a rare convergence of pop-perfect hooks, idiosyncratic arrangements, and intermittently explosive energy—a quality they’ve shown in touring with the likes of Our Lady Peace, Amber Run, and BANNERS over the years. In working with Walla (whose production credits include Tegan and Sara, The Thermals, and Foxing), Ellevator fully embraced their identity as a rock band, surrendering to an untamed spontaneity in bringing each song to life. To that end, the album’s luminous opening track “Claws” set the tone for the near-magical synergy that essentially fueled all of The Words You Spoke Still Move Me. “‘Claws’ came from a session where we were just goofing around, playing each other’s instruments, and suddenly we had this very hopeful song that felt like it belonged to another band,” Nabi recalls. “With so many of these songs, we were surprised by how fun they felt to us,” Elliott adds. “So even though they still go to dark places, there’s always that excitement and happiness underneath it all.”

In many ways a meditation on the precarious interplay between love and power, The Words You Spoke Still Move Me slips into an irresistible urgency on tracks like “Easy,” a song inspired by Nabi’s upbringing in the world of charismatic Christianity. “When I was 17 I moved to the other side of the world and joined what I’d now call a cult,” she says. “I won’t deny that I had an incredible and life-changing experience there, but as I’ve gotten further away from it I’ve realized how there was way more damage done than good.” With its potent rhythms and galvanizing guitar work, “Easy” ultimately examines what Nabi refers to as “the good and evil things we are raised to believe,” spotlighting the beautifully strange poetry of her self-reflection (from the song’s closing lines: “The fistful of flowers we were handed/On the day that we were saved/Are blue and gold/And they smell like honey/They’ve all dried out/But they were once so lovely”). 

One of the quietest moments on The Words You Spoke Still Move Me, “Charlie IO” unfolds in delicate grooves and sweetly playful lyrics that perfectly illustrate the free-flowing nature of the album-making process. “I was being cheeky and singing ‘Charlie I, Charlie O, Charlie Ayahuasca’ as a placeholder for the chorus lyrics, and then we ended up keeping it in the song,” says Nabi. “We decided ‘Charlie Ayahuasca’ was a great name for a character, and created a story of someone who’s spending all their time trying to find themselves instead of doing the less sexy work of just being a good person,” Tyler continues. “It’s very easy in this world to get caught up in that sort of navel-gazing, but at some point you’ve just got to own your shit and move forward.” 

In its tender instruction for living more intentionally, The Words You Spoke Still Move Me finds an ideal vessel in Nabi’s spellbinding voice and extraordinary ability to serenely channel an entire world of feeling. On the gloriously combustible “Sacred Heart,” for instance, Ellevator’s mood shifts from raw frustration to aching desperation as Nabi laments the psychic claustrophobia often triggered by real intimacy (from the first verse: “I can’t tell us apart when you’re hanging off my neck like a sacred heart”). Built on a heady collision of crystalline beats, “Slip” achieves a thrillingly dramatic intensity at its guitar-drenched bridge, a heart-wrenching cry to be set free. “That’s another song about religion and escape, but tied together with the old Celtic myth of selkie women: seal women who would move to land and shed their skins and become human, and then men would steal their skins and take the women as wives so they couldn’t return to sea,” Nabi explains. “In ‘Slip’ a selkie woman has her skin stolen by a cult leader, and in the end she drowns him.” And on the heavenly but heavy-hearted “STAR,” Ellevator present an intensely personal exploration of the fragility of identity. “The chorus to that song says ‘Teenage pretender/Follow the leader’ but it’s not specifically about adolescence,” says Nabi. “It’s about everyone’s search for who we really are, what we see and what we repeat, and how badly we want ourselves to be seen.” 

For Ellevator, the unfettered and wildly expansive imagination of The Words You Spoke Still Move Me stems in part from the charmed camaraderie of their recording sessions. Although the band worked in a number of different studios (including Walla’s own Hall of Justice in Seattle), much of the album took shape during the nine days they spent living together at The Bathouse (a Kingston-area facility owned by Canadian alt-rock legends The Tragically Hip). “The building’s about 150-years-old and it’s very much like a clubhouse,” says Tyler. “As soon as you walk in you can feel that it’s a space where this family has made so much art, and I think that affected us pretty deeply.” Equally elemental was Ellevator’s immediate kinship with the illustrious Walla, who sometimes helped stimulate the band’s creative energy by pulling up strategically selected film scenes as they recorded (including, however improbably, a shot of Tom Cruise riding his motorcycle along the airbase runway in Top Gun). “One of my favorite moments was when we were working on ‘Charlie’ and Chris played this video of a train going north into the countryside in Norway,” says Nabi. “In the video the sun’s setting and it’s this moment of peaceful contemplation, and we ended up recording layers and layers of humming that just fit perfectly.”

In choosing the title for their debut album, Ellevator lifted a line from “Mother,” a gorgeously poignant portrait of grief and denial. “I think a lot of us have gotten in the habit of trying to numb ourselves over the past few years, so we don’t have to feel as deeply given the state of the world and everything we’ve been through,” says Tyler. “To me the album title is about art and its power to make you feel, to produce some kind of visceral reaction, whether that’s happiness or sadness or anger or whatever else.” And with the release of The Words You Spoke Still Move Me, Ellevator hope that their songs might not only provide an antidote to numbness, but also restore an undeniable sense of emotional courage. “We’d love for people to come away feeling empowered to really take on all the difficult things, rather than feeling burdened by them,” says Nabi. “Because even though there are some moments of heaviness and negativity on the album, there’s always a feeling of being undefeated. And to us that’s where the hope is.”

__ written by Elizabeth Barker