On February 28th, Canadian alternative rock band “Elita” announced the upcoming release of their soon-to-be debut album, “Hell Hill”, which comes out on April 25th. Elita was formed in 2018 and consists of vocalist Elita Harkov, guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, and Elita’s boyfriend, Timothy Rypien, and bassist/guitarist Johnny Krank. Since their creation, the trio has released singles, EPs, and a mixtape album in 2023. Many fans had speculated this upcoming album, seeing as to how the band has released four singles in a row since September 23rd, 2024, all of which will be featured on the album. Their most recent single is titled “Planet Paparazzi”, and was released on February 28th, 2025, the same day the announcement for Hell Hill’s release was made. Due to all the fan excitement, a lot of things have happened regarding the band.
First off, what’s the deal with this band? What is their music like? A good glimpse into Elita’s genre was made by Spotify, in which they label some of their songs with intriguing tags such as “Morute”, “Vampiric”, “Whimsigothic”, “Darkwave” and “Ethereal”. These tags are very accurate, as many of their songs and music videos follow openly dark topics and settings. Some examples of such scenery used by the band are cemeteries, cities and the woods, which are often paired with themes of sadness, desire and vanity. A much more artistic explanation of the trio’s musical style was described by twnty three, in which they say, “In spite of the ghostly influence, it’s glitchy and online, but with a beating bloody heart bumping oxygen throughout a soft human body.”
Putting the band’s music aside, let’s talk about something unfortunate and important that has been done with it. On March 3rd, Elita took to her Discord server, elita worldwide, to share the news that Hell Hill has been leaked before the set release. She expressed her sorrows, saying that she was “Beyond disappointed about the album leak on Saturday. It feels super violating when music you spent years making gets released without your consent. Never considered it a possibility, and we are extremely let down that this happened.”
Even before Elita’s announcement, the improperly released songs could be viewed on many places around the internet. The main place to view the now leaked album is the famed music info site, Genius. When users go to view Elita’s music profile, or namely Hell Hill, a handful of aspects about said album can be viewed. These aspects range from tracks, song lyrics, fan made annotations on leaked songs and even little gaps in the lyrics written by sneaky fans who couldn’t transcribe the audio properly.
Without hurting Elita by listening to the supposed-to-be unpublished music before the proper release, what we can expect from Hell Hill is a loud but almost calming album filled with deep themes that are paired with unique melodies of synth and guitar. Since Elita is not too popular yet has had so much fan turmoil revolving around the album comes a key takeaway; no matter how underrated something may be, there will always be impatient, obsessive people that yearn to know everything about what someone is doing, even if the extents they’ll go is harmful to their beloved celebrity.
