Beltway Is Burning

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the 2024 U.S. General Election, Ekko Astral's second album the beltway is burning was always intended as a real-time historical document in the form of a dark comedy.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.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.