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For more than four decades, Crowded House leader Neil Finn has been on an evolving, winding journey. Crowded House’s mid-Eighties hits like “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and “Something So Strong,” combined with albums like Woodface and Together Alone, set the standard for the period’s erudite jangle-pop while always pushing the band’s art forward. 

That creative spirit brings Finn and his Crowded House bandmates to Gravity Stairs, their first new release since 2021’s Dreamers Are Waiting and eighth overall. Produced by the band with Steven Schram, the album shows Crowded House in its current incarnation — Finn, Nick Seymour, Mitchell Froom, and Finn’s sons Elroy and Liam — as sharp as ever, feeling musically adventurous, and still capable of reaching the staggering highs that have made them an international favorite. It’s the act of climbing those figurative “gravity stairs,” inspired by a heavy stone staircase near where Finn vacations, that he likens to his own mindset as a creator. 

The Gravity Stairs are symbolic of the struggle to ascend, acknowledging the opposing forces of weight on the mechanics of living. It’s an act of will everyday. Finn describes that process in “Magic Piano,” which opens the album. Lush and sophisticated, the song’s arrangement captures an almost hallucinatory feeling of drifting upward. “Let the melody reign, oh yeah,” 

Finn sings, offering homage to what he calls his “slavish devotion to music.” Finn’s résumé bears that out. From joining his brother Tim in the Eighties artful pop band Split Enz to leading Crowded House to his numerous solo efforts, 

Finn’s varied body of work is connected by his knack for penning meticulous, indelible melodies and impressionistic lyrics that demand multiple listens. It’s earned him devoted fans all over the globe. 

“Magic Piano” marked one of the first songs the band — whose members currently reside in four different countries — attempted to work up in rehearsals ahead of their recording sessions for Gravity Stairs, which took place in Australia, New Zealand, and California. The second day they played it, it suddenly clicked. “It was a very different song when we started playing it. It was probably ambitious as a first recording because it’s not a simple song — it’s got a lot of twists and turns,” Finn says. “But the aim is to produce something that sounds effortless, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and that it’s always existed like that. That’s the art of record making.”