Aubrey Ellefson of Brass Camel (who does keyboards and vocals) speaks to us about the making of the band’s latest album, Brass Camel (2026):

This self-titled record represents both a consolidation of the band’s previous strengths, and an evolution in other ways. For starters, this is the first album of material entirely written during the tenure of the current lineup – even the previous album Camel, recorded with the full five-piece, still contained much material conceived during more primordial stages of the project. Second of all, the mix gets a decidedly more old-school treatment this time as we had the honour of getting Terry Brown of Rush production fame on board. Nevertheless, we see this as a culmination of a loose three-album cycle that firmly establishes what we’re about, as evidenced by the cheeky progression of titles “Brass,” “Camel,” and finally “Brass Camel.”

I’d say we have a funny relationship with the concept of “prog” – some of our influences closest to our hearts are unabashedly classic progressive rock giants such as Genesis, Rush, Yes, Gentle Giant et al., but we also don’t necessarily want to pigeonhole ourselves, and there’s nothing on this latest one like the 11-minute monsters that open and close the last album. We’d say this new one is both more and less prog than our previous work, whatever that means, and despite the more conventional track lengths, there’s some of our zaniest bits yet, and more willingness to dabble with different styles and textures. There’s some of the most overt funk yet on some tracks, as well as more electronic textures on others, and even a real harpsichord! No acoustic guitars allowed yet, though. (Maybe in the future; we’ll never tell!) We’ll probably always do a certain amount of shredding, odd time signatures, and crazy song forms, but in the end we just want to make interesting rock music that’s enjoyable for everyone, whatever that means for a group of guys with a perpetual case of zoomies like ourselves.

Another difference this time was in the recording process itself – rather than booking studio time in our hometown of Vancouver again, we teamed up with Kevin Comeau of Ontario-based band Crown Lands and recorded the bulk of the album during a cross-Canada tour at a beautiful studio out in the country called the Chalet. This really allowed us to eat, sleep, and breathe music and keep the creative juices flowing in a way that’s just not possible at home with the usual day-to-day distractions.

One goal this time was for the lyrical content to be more central to the creative process. Not to throw any of our older material under the bus, and plenty of our older material does have something to say if you read between the lines, but this time we wanted to avoid feeling like anything was a collection of riffs with lyrics as an afterthought. Each track here explores a specific concept or story, from the legend of the Jersey Devil, to a dramatic narration of the Titan submersible disaster, to tackling the can of worms that is AI vs. the creative process, and many more.

We’ve also never made a music video up until this point, and as of this writing we’ve now shot four! Almost in the same spirit of having a strong conceptual framework for the songs, it turns out it’s a lot of fun to come up with silly ideas for videos and figure out how to make them happen. When you’re a band who spends as much time as we have together, including four proper tours being joined at the hip almost 24/7, our natural chemistry and sense of humour takes on a life of its own, and we might as well stick a camera in front of that and hope the general public is as amused as we are.

Photo credits: Heather Horncastle Photography