LP – Limited Edition ‘Red in Red’ Colour Vinyl with Obi and printed sleeve. Includes download card.

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the 2024 U.S. General Election, Ekko Astrals second album the beltway is burning was always intended as a real-time historical document in the form of a dark comedy.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 fictionalised version of The Beltway, in which Adam Sandler is a god-president and the DMV has become a demilitarised 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, 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 albums pop diamond lovesick american romance: a 90s rock-indebted anthem that snarls at mainstream cultures embrace of the manosphere. And then theres the albums 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 bands 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 dont know whats wrong / how can it be righted? This kind of tension is omnipresent in Ekko Astrals work, grounding beltway in our present reality, injecting urgency and realism into each song despite their surrealist contours.

Tracklist:

1. body generation
2. lil xan goes to washington
3. horseglue
4. beltway
5. wmata
6. this is not a call to action but a lamentation on the situation at hand (or, capital riot)
7. elegy for a system
8. lovesick american romance
9. dude with guitars
10. sandler ’36
11. blood mountain
12. comet ping pong