“I can see you shifting in your seat,” says Jael Holzman of Ekko Astral on the spoken intro to “head empty blues,” as synth tones shudder around her. The first words on the D.C. noise punk band’s debut album, pink balloons, are also the first words of Ari Drennen’s poem “Out at Dinner.” As Holzman explains, the poem describes the awkward urgency of a casual conversation turned uncomfortably real.
“It’s when someone goes, ‘You know, I’m pretty sure the whole time we’ve been having dinner, at least 60 Palestinian children died,’” she says. “And everyone goes, ‘Why did you fuckin’ bring that up?’”
We’re not exactly out at dinner when she says it, but the point lands; pink balloons was written by and for people who aren’t afraid of a challenging conversation. On an overcast International Women’s Day, we’re enjoying chips, guacamole, and margaritas at a local taco shop—one stop on an hours-long walk up and down 14th Street NW, during which Holzman and rhythm guitarist Sam Elmore unpack the band’s vision for the new album. Like all music, it strikes at your inner ear, but Ekko Astral aren’t content with just your cochlea; they take aim at your center of balance too, as the spooky synths give way to gut-rumbling drums and distorted bass.
“[For me] the goal was always to try and sonically nail the anxiety so many people feel, and lean into that … so there can be a release,” says Holzman.
Ekko Astral have been after that goal from the beginning—it’s something the band wanted to accomplish on their 2022 debut EP, Quartz (a concept record about Holzman’s experience coming out as transgender and starting to transition). It’s also not so different from what Holzman pursues in her other career. Though she grew up in Rockville, she studied English at the University of Vermont, where she met Ekko Astral’s lead guitarist Liam Hughes and discovered a passion for investigative journalism. Now a climate and energy reporter, as well as a punk singer, she sees music and journalism as different means to the same end.
“It’s about finding innovative ways to connect with people and give them new light into the way the world has always been, but they weren’t aware of,” she says. “I actually think music is better than journalism at doing that, nowadays.”
In the making of pink balloons, the members of Ekko Astral—Holzman, Elmore, and Hughes, along with bassist Guinevere Tully and drummer Miri Tyler (who also plays in Pretty Bitter)—centered that belief in the efficacy of music for connecting with people. Working with producer Jeremy Snyder at Fidelitorium Recordings in Kernersville, North Carolina, the band estimate they spent as much time talking about the world as they did laying down the tracks. It was March of 2023, and at the time, Holzman says, she was watching from her position as a media-addicted journalist as anti-trans sentiment and legislation continued to proliferate. Pundits and social media posters often call it culture war. When I parrot the phrase, Holzman corrects me.
“‘Culture war’ is a terrible thing to call a fight over medication,” she says. “People in the press would be wise to talk about the fact that trans people who no longer organically produce hormones will die if they are not able to access HRT. When people were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act aggressively, no one called it a culture war.”
Crucially, though, pink balloons’ most direct reference to medicine doesn’t concern hormones. The discordant spoken-word piece “somewhere at the bottom of the river between l’enfant and eastern market” features the most harrowing lines from Drennen’s poem, but it also samples a recorded conversation with Holzman’s late grandfather about the medications he relied on as he got older.
“I need medication to stay alive,” Holzman explains. “So did my grandfather. People will hear ‘culture war’ or ‘trans rights,’ but the actual truth of it is lost because they either haven’t been exposed to someone who’s trans, or they haven’t been exposed to the medical facts.”
That gets at one way pink balloons expands on its predecessor; it’s not just the higher volume of jokes, puns, and references that populate the lyrics, and it’s not just the way Holzman amps up the vocal intensity. Where Quartz was an album with a singular focus, the new record points to the interconnectedness of its subjects—in pummeling art rock songs that weave together feminism (“head empty blues”), missing and murdered Indigenous people (“devorah”), and the profitability of human suffering (“on brand”).
Not coincidentally, pink balloons also reads as more of a D.C. record, and not just because of song titles that include “burning alive on k street.” Holzman and Elmore call it a case of writing what they know, as a band acquainted with the specific anxiety of living and working in the city they call the “imperial core.” As in all things, Holzman is quick to qualify their relationship to the culture of the capital.
“We’re not responding to this,” she says. “We’re conveying how it feels to exist within it. Part of the reason political music sucks so much is so many ostensibly political songs will just tell people an idea, like, ‘Feel this way!’ Never works. Don’t tell people how to feel—tell people how it feels.”
Holzman takes the same stance against dogma in defining her artistic influences. Along with pillars of post-punk such as Idles, she cites genre-transcending acts like Kendrick Lamar and Ethel Cain. Avoiding the pitfalls of didactic punk music is one thing, but Holzman goes further, calling herself apolitical as an artist and journalist alike.
“I spend my day getting to know people across political spectrums,” she says. “Some of the best friends I have in the world are Republicans. And how does that happen?”
I start shifting in my seat. How does that happen?
“That happens because people are people. We’ve become convinced that the internet is somehow reality, but like with music, when you experience someone’s humanity, you don’t see them as some stereotype. You meet them face to face, and you actually wind up in a situation that can forge strong bonds.”
Weeks later, on April 5 at Black Cat, Ekko Astral held a live album taping, and I saw those strong bonds firsthand in the mosh pit. The show reaches its emotional peak when the band transforms the closing lines of Drennen’s “Out at Dinner” into a surging refrain on the slowcore-inspired power ballad “i90”: “If you walk through a cemetery, you’ll pass/ People buried under gravestones of strangers/ I have friends still, hiding while you throw a parade.” Just as they envisioned, anxiety gives way to communal release as shoulders and elbows collide.
Ekko Astral have already generated a fair amount of hype—here at City Paper, and in outlets like Paste, where a feature name-checked the band as successors to Fugazi. USA Today even used “mascara moshpit,” their chosen genre tagline, as a crossword puzzle answer. The power of their live show and the ambition of pink balloons justify the fervor, but for the band, any outside attention just offers more opportunity to move their listeners to imagine a better future for everyone.
“Nobody can actually change somebody else, but you can create a space where they feel safe to start to change themselves,” says Elmore. “Through putting on a safe show that has a community environment where we’re able to explore certain ideas, or feelings, or sounds … it can kinda crack you open.”
As a D.C. band, Holzman says, Ekko Astral feel responsible for having something worthwhile to say to their constituents. At the same time, she feels, when you can spin up a circle pit in a center of global influence, you’ve got a better shot than most at making a real difference.
“Culture is upstream from politics,” she says. “We as culture creators have an opportunity to actually be participants in crafting the culture that those people who run the world live within … and maybe, just maybe, make far more of a difference in the way the world works than someone who’s either out in the street or writing a frickin’ article.”
Ekko Astral’s debut album, pink balloons, is available via Topshelf Records on April 17. ekkoastral.bandcamp.com
Ekko Astral opens for Ted Leo And The Pharmacists on June 20 at 9:30 Club. 930.com. $25.
