"Some Greater Plan (For Claire)" Released: 1 October 2024[3]
Gravity Stairs is the eighth studio album by New Zealand-Australianrock bandCrowded House, released on 31 May 2024 through Lester Records andBMG Rights Management. It was preceded by the release of the lead single "Oh Hi" on 8 February 2024. The album received favourable reviews from critics.
At theAIR Awards of 2025, Steven Schram received a nomination in the field of Independent Mix, Studio or Mastering Engineer of the Year for work on this album.[5]
The band produced the album with Steven Schram,[6] with frontmanNeil Finn stating that the band wanted to maintain a "dreamy quality" on the record yet be more "lyrically direct".[7] Lead single "Oh Hi" was inspired by Finn's work for the nonprofit organisation So They Can, which builds schools in remote areas ofKenya andTanzania.[8] Finn named the album after a stone staircase near a place he vacations, which he compared to his mentality as a musician, calling the title a "metaphor for getting a little older and becoming aware of your own mortality, your own physicality" as there is "more determination needed to get to the top, but there's still the same compulsion to climb".[8] The cover art is a pastiche ofthe Beatles' 1966 albumRevolver[9] drawn byNick Seymour.[10]
Gravity Stairs received a score of 73 out of 100 on review aggregatorMetacritic based on five reviews, which the website categorised as "generally favorable" reception.[11]Mojo's Andy Fyfe called the album "the most Crowded House thing that Crowded House have made in 30 years" as "'Teenage Summer', 'Oh Hi' and particularly 'All That I Can Ever Own' and 'The Howl' effortlessly withstand direct comparison with the band's mid-'90s peak".[13] John Murphy ofMusicOMH summarised it as "a welcome reminder that the Finn family are still going strong, with upbeat, breezy numbers set against languid, deliberately paced tracks".[14]
Damian Jones ofClassic Rock wrote that "gone (for the most part) are the familiar pop hooks that dominated [the band's] early records, exchanged for more thoughtful, complicated arrangements as frontman Neil Finn contemplates his own mortality".[12]Uncut felt that "Crowded House's eighth studio release ticks all the expected boxes. Pitch-perfect harmonies and inventive chord sequences abound. [...] Where it falls short, perhaps, is the absence of the full-blooded radio-friendly hits of old, although the shuffling 'All That I Can Ever Own' is a close cousin to 1993's 'Distant Sun'".[15]
[12]