On Elephant Hill is the debut album from Big Trouble, the Los Angeles-based project led by Justin Kohlberg (Moonrun) and Daniel Talamantes and it’s scheduled for release on the 18th of September on Royal Oakie Records. Written and recorded by the duo in Kohlberg’s home studio, The Greenhouse, mixed by Adrian Olsen (Fruit Bats, Buck Meek, Michael Nau), and mastered by Jack Doutt, the album is the fruit of a multi-year collaboration, featuring contributions from friends across the country, including Joe Kaplow, Kelly Koval, Andy Page, and David Allred.
Kohlberg (a multi-instrumentalist who’s played with Rose Droll, Naytronix, and Erisy Watt, among others) and Talamantes (a singer/guitarist/keyboard player) first met at a video shoot in 2016. Before long, they found themselves collaborating frequently and getting together to jam in their free time–it was from those sessions that the album emerged.
Lyrically, the album takes its cues from the works of Carl Jung, W.B. Yeats, and Ricardo Flores Mágon, while also being informed by Talamantes’s activism in environmental and social justice. The single, Mel, is inspired by Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. Talamantes expounds, “Mel is about getting into movements, but also has a personal stake in involvement. It takes on the call and response of Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree—you’re offering everything, even when you know giving can turn into self-erasure. It was a slower song that we kicked up a gear. A straightforward rocker with some assistance from homies. The song Dange riffs off 70’s soul while recounting the ICE raids in Los Angeles during June 2025, and Signal satirizes the cognitive dissonance so prevalent in American society these days. Signal follows a guy in the suburbs who’s checked out. He can see what’s going on around him, but he doesn’t fully let himself process it. He goes through the motions, stays comfortable, and avoids confronting the damage. It’s about that quiet, everyday denial.”
The album can be preordered here.
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