Elephant Gym World Tour (EU & MNG)

Math-rock band Elephant Gym marked their tenth anniversary in 2024 with the announcement of their fourth studio album, World, alongside their first world tour — nearly 20 countries across Asia, Europe and the Americas, 40 shows in total, including first-time stops in Vietnam, Mexico and Mongolia. The Europe and Mongolia leg, planned by In Utero, was the single leg with the most new territory on the whole tour: Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Bristol and Manchester, closing out in Ulaanbaatar.

Since their 2013 debut, the band has played stages from Japan's Fuji Rock to the US's Camp Flog Gnaw and SXSW, racking up over a hundred overseas shows — but their first large-scale world tour in four years still brought fresh challenges. Guitarist Kai Hsiang put it this way: "Our relationship with each country is at a different stage, so the feeling walking into each city is really different. There's excitement about unlocking a new place on the map, but also nerves about the unknown — we just want to make a good first impression." Drummer Chia-chin, the band's point person for overseas logistics, laughed that the band made a pact to train individually before the tour: "Building up our stamina is really just so we don't end up fighting with each other on the road."

This song unlocked Elephant Gym's rock soul. The straightforward drums and bass, the distorted guitar bends, Yiyueh's cool, clear vocals — it should shake off whatever's weighing on the listener.

The anniversary album World brought together musicians from around the globe, including "Freckles"-vocalist Yiyueh on the track "The Happy Prince," and a brass-band reimagining of "Ocean in the Night" with the Kaohsiung Municipal Concert Band, again featuring Transparent Magazine's frontman Hung Shen-hao on vocals — the same artist who sang on the original version a decade earlier. A brand-new music video for "Ocean in the Night," released ten years after the song itself, stitches together a decade of the band's memories on the road.

Ten cities across Europe plus Mongolia — this tour was never just one album's promotional run. It's the visible result of a decade of Elephant Gym's own overseas network, built up alongside In Utero's long-term work in international tour planning.