Until very recently, Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, who record under the name Whitney, were best known as former members of the Chicago band Smith Westerns.

Now, “Light Upon the Lake,” the band’s debut album, is one of Elton’s favorite records of the year — a metric of success that is surreal, bordering on unthinkable, for the duo. “I just fell in love with the music,” Elton said, after it was recommended by a friend, the Guardian writer Alexis Petridis. “I went on the website and I saw the video for ‘No Woman.’ It was fantastic. I thought it was so wistful and so plaintive and no one else sounded like that.”

Elton was so enamored with Whitney that he has played them on the Beats1 radio show he hosts, “Elton John’s Rocket Hour.” “The whole purpose of me doing the Apple show is to play stuff that I like but to hopefully focus on new people,” he said, noting his displeasure with mainstream radio using colorful, unprintable language. “Anything I can do to put new music on the radio.” Elton, who is 69, is at work on his autobiography, and has begun looking back on a career that spans decades of exploits, musical and otherwise. But last week, he was more interested in talking to Whitney’s 25-year-old Ehrlich about his rapidly ascending new project. “You’re a newborn baby this year and you’re growing in the right direction,” Elton told Ehrlich, his tone paternal but not patronizing. “More power to you and thank you for the music, all right?”

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