Ekko Astral promo photo

Ekko Astral

pink balloons went pop, and now everything's in black and white.

When Ekko Astral dropped their searing debut pink balloons in 2024, it would be another year and change before Trump took office and deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C. Recorded immediately after the 2024 U.S. General Election, Ekko Astral’s second album the beltway is burning was always intended as a real-time historical document in the form of a dark comedy. Each song plays out like a vignette, with Ekko Astral beckoning listeners into their fictionalized version of The Beltway (the area within I-495), in which Adam Sandler is a god-president and the DMV has become a demilitarized zone, a wasteland run by butt rockers and Soundcloud rappers.

On the surrealist lead single “lil xan goes to washington,” the titular character travels to D.C. to lobby for addiction assistance legislation before succumbing to the cartoonish horror that is K Street (where all major lobbying firms are based), ultimately becoming a sellout himself. Such noisy, absurd caricatures abound on beltway, whose anchors are simultaneously heavier, poppier, and more complex than on predecessor pink balloons.

Take the album’s pop diamond “lovesick american romance”: a 90s rock-indebted anthem that snarls at mainstream culture’s embrace of the manosphere. And then there’s the album’s centerpiece, “this is not a call to action but a lamentation on the situation at hand (or, capital riot),” which sees the band take an entirely new direction in a stretched-out, climactic barn-burner that invites listeners into the band’s funhouse version of D.C.

Where pink balloons was written to uplift, the beltway is burning is meant to remind you of the stakes. On penultimate track “blood mountain,” Holzman asks “if I don’t know what’s wrong / how can it be righted?” This kind of tension is omnipresent in Ekko Astral’s work, grounding beltway in our present reality, injecting urgency and realism into each song despite their surrealist contours.

Upcoming Shows

March 26, 2026 Seattle, WA The Crocodile
March 27, 2026 Boise, ID Treefort Music Fest
March 28, 2026 Portland, OR Aladdin Theater
March 30, 2026 San Francisco, CA The Chapel
March 31, 2026 Los Angeles, CA The Regent Theater
April 25, 2026 Washington, DC Black Cat
May 29, 2026 Kingston, NY Tubby's
May 30, 2026 Winooski, VT The Monkey House
May 31, 2026 Portland, ME SPACE
June 02, 2026 Pawtucket, RI Machines With Magnets
June 03, 2026 Somerville, MA The Rockwell
June 05, 2026 New York, NY Night Club 101
June 06, 2026 Philadelphia, PA PhilaMOCA

Media Assets

Videos

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Ekko Astral - "lil xan goes to washington" [Official Music Video]

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Ekko Astral - "horseglue" [Official Music Video]

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Ekko Astral - "i90" feat. Josaleigh Pollett (Live in Salt Lake City)