Los Angeles duo Big Trouble return with ‘Dange’, the second track from their forthcoming debut album, ‘On Elephant Hill’, out September 18 via Royal Oakie Records. We’re pleased to premiere the new single below.

Big Trouble is the collaboration between Justin Kohlberg and Daniel Talamantes, who first met at a video shoot in 2016 and gradually started playing together whenever they had the chance. Those sessions eventually grew into ‘On Elephant Hill’, a record made over several years at Kohlberg’s home studio, The Greenhouse.

‘Dange’ comes from a very specific place and time. The song was written in response to the ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles in June 2025, particularly their impact on Latine communities. Rather than hiding that subject behind abstraction, Big Trouble keep the idea fairly plain: fear becoming part of everyday life, and surveillance gradually being treated as something normal.

“Dange comes straight out of Los Angeles in June 2025, when ICE was raiding Latine communities,” the band explain. “There’s nothing poetically complicated about it. It’s about a very real, localized fear and the normalization of such surveillance.”

Musically, they went somewhere quite different from the heaviness of the subject.

“It has that ’70s aesthetic that matched our message. We called on friends from across the US to add that late-night energy.”

<a href="https://bigtroubleinca.bandcamp.com/album/on-elephant-hill">On Elephant Hill by Big Trouble</a>

That contrast says quite a bit about ‘On Elephant Hill’. The album moves between indie rock, folk and soul, with Big Trouble citing Kate Bush, Juan Gabriel and Paul McCartney among their touchstones, but it isn’t really built around one fixed sound. There are also traces of Talk Talk, Brian Eno and Broken Social Scene in the way the duo use the studio as part of the arrangement rather than simply a place to document the songs.

Kohlberg and Talamantes wrote and recorded the album themselves, with contributions from Joe Kaplow, Kelly Koval, Andy Page and David Allred. Adrian Olsen, whose credits include Fruit Bats, Buck Meek and Michael Nau, mixed the record, while Jack Doutt handled mastering.

The lyrics also reach beyond the usual relationship material. Talamantes’ involvement in environmental and social justice activism feeds directly into several songs, while the writing draws on Carl Jung, W.B. Yeats and Ricardo Flores Magón.

That was already present on first single ‘Mel’, which took Shel Silverstein’s ‘The Giving Tree’ as a starting point for a song about activism and the point where giving everything to a cause can begin to erase the person doing the giving.

Elsewhere, ‘Signal’ looks at a different kind of political response: someone who can see what is happening around him but remains comfortable enough not to really confront it. ‘Avantone’ is described by the band as a celebration of resistance across the Americas, using found sounds recorded around East Los Angeles.

So while ‘On Elephant Hill’ wanders quite freely musically, there is a clear thread underneath it. Big Trouble are interested in what people notice, what they choose not to notice, and what happens when political events stop feeling distant and enter everyday life.

Headline credit: Eliza Eaton

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