By Last August, while plastered with my girlfriend’s strictly nonfiction-reading father, he and I talked about how the magic of a child’s dreams coming true in my favorite novel, 2 AM at the Cat’s Pajamas, brought me to tears. He looked at me and asked how that worked. Drunkenly, I slurred something about not caring about facts of existence, how the emotions evoked by art impact me, and how I was a communist not because I cared about Marx’s theories on value but because I think everyone should get their basic necessities without unnecessary struggle.
What I was trying to drunkenly explain is that I believe art has the power to shape the audience’s views on the world through how it impacts you emotionally. That is why the movies I hate aren’t films that fail to entertain but rather ones that shallowly engage in the most mundane thoughts, like JOKER. Artists have a responsibility to infuse their art with critical thought. That’s not to say you can’t put bad things on the screen—I think the works JOKER is aping, like TAXI DRIVER, serve serious societal purposes while entertaining. Art should make you a part of the process of shaping its meaning. Jazz Monroe’s Pitchfork review of IDLES’ 2020 album ULTRA MONO criticizes the band’s attempt to make a necessary album as the work of a radical hobbyist: “Not listening, just shouting,” has stuck with me for this reason. The pieces of art that have most impacted my political thinking (1984, BLADE RUNNER, Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY.) have done so through detail and emotion, not through sloganeering.
I’ve been reading through all of Eve Babitz’s books over the last year and was happy while reading the chapter “The Hollywood Branch Library” in Eve’s Hollywood to see her make my exact point in a far more concise and witty way than my drunken rambling ever could: “It was [Virginia Woolf’s] A Room of One’s Own that made me believe in Women’s Lib. I never liked it when Gloria the Crass and Gross was trying to write about it—it was like reading that radical propaganda where the words are so poorly selected and so divorced from humans that you have to really discount your eyes to be able to let what they’re saying get into your head. But when Virginia Woolf does it, it’s easy. She’s right and they’re wrong.”
In the sober light of day, I stand by my assessment. Those same feelings are why I ride or die for Ekko Astral, not just because their music rocks but because it rubs your face in the mess we’ve made. In an interview with Eli Enis, frontwoman Jael Holzman said: “One of the few things that Steve Bannon has ever gotten right is that culture is upstream of politics… I think our music is kind of like the weaponry (in the culture war).”
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I became aware of Ekko Astral after they played Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn with Bad Moves around the time their shirts started springing up around town last summer. I checked out their lone EP, QUARTZ, and realized quickly I’d been missing out, especially considering I was supposed to have seen them already. Earlier, in January of 2023, they came up from D.C. for their first show in Brooklyn with locals Crush Fund, who were becoming my new obsession. If not for catching COVID a second time, I would have hopped on the hype train much earlier because you can’t see Ekko Astral live and leave without feeling like you just witnessed something huge.
I finally saw the band at Our Wicked Lady in Brooklyn on December 30th. I’d been listening to an advance of PINK BALLOONS for a month at that point, absolutely in love with every song and noise, but could not imagine the band sounding as good live, with simply too much going on in the production to capture. But somehow Ekko Astral sounded better live—that’s the biggest compliment I can give them, because the record sounds like your brain is melting.
But the first time I heard PINK BALLOONS, I was only half paying attention because I was rushing to meet a friend who just got into town. I got out of the shower to see the link to the advance and absently clicked it as I tossed my laptop onto my bed to start putting together my fit. Suddenly, a burst of feedback popped into the mix of whatever I was listening to. I thought my laptop was fucked up when I turned off my music, and it didn’t stop. Then the echo of Jael incanting, “I can see you shifting in your seat,” rang out.
The first four songs flew by. They rocked, but it wasn’t until “on brand” faded out that I had to stop getting dressed to just listen. I often talk about how I spent the first half of MULHOLLAND DRIVE astounded by its critical acclaim, but when the switch happened I realized it was made by a genius. How the opening of the blue box reinvents everything that came before is the work of only a brilliant dramatist.
The beat of “somewhere at the bottom…” is how I think a real-life skeleton xylophone would sound. Holzman’s reading of Ari Drennen’s poem “out at dinner” is an elephant gun of a performance as she lays out how it feels to explain the material realities of being trans to an audience who doesn’t want to think about the fact that the world they live in kills us. A co-worker keeps asking me if I have started a retirement account while telling me how much she regrets not starting one earlier than she did. I don’t know how to tell her that I don’t know of any trans elders who have survived long enough to retire, let alone that I think the future the status quo envisions doesn’t include me in it. When she asks me about my finances, Holzman’s voice saying, “Lots of us don’t make it here,” rings in my head. The odds are stacked against us, and I know my co-worker would prefer not to have that conversation while reshelving books.
“somewhere at the bottom…” could easily be read as a condemnation of the people who are uncomfortable hearing about the material reality of trans lives, but I find it to be more of a plea to listen than a callout. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a letter to the chairman of the School Board of Drake, North Dakota, railing against the man’s decision to ban and subsequently burn copies of Slaughterhouse Five by defending his books against the charges of crassness by saying, “They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.” Ari Drennen’s poem serves this record as the central question: when someone comes to you with issues concerning the conditions of their lives, do you listen and help them, or will you change the topic to something you feel more comfortable with?
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I wish it hadn’t taken me until December of 2023 to finally see Ekko Astral live because, for the 40 minutes that the band was playing, they envisioned a kinder, more responsible world. It reminded me of the line in Against Me!’s “I Still Love You Julie” when Laura Jane Grace sings “Given the chance / I’d stay in this chorus forever / Where everything ugly in this world / Is sadly beautiful.”
It was freezing on the rooftop of Our Wicked Lady. Holzman opened Ekko Astral’s set alone with a new song called “my body is an abortion,” and followed it with material from PINK BALLOONS and the irresistible QUARTZ cut “EAT OFF MY CHEST (WHILE I STARE AT THE CAMERA).” Being the one song they played that was out, it got the biggest response, but it’s not just because the crowd knew it. The ska-inflicted song’s titular hook draws the whole audience to shout it back into Holzman’s face. It’s a dare to the guy staring to fuck with you because in this moment all these people have your back. Ekko Astral has dubbed their sound “mascara moshpit,” but to crib a line from “EAT OFF MY CHEST…,” Girl Galaxy could fit just as well.
I was already tempted to go to D.C. in January to finally see Ekko Astral share a bill with Crush Fund, but that night made Ekko Astral my new fixation. So, I found myself on a 70-degree day in the nation’s capital. A friend from college picked me up from the train station the night before the show, and as we drove to his apartment, we passed the Pentagon. Over the three years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve gotten used to existing alongside buildings that represent power, but I can’t imagine how one can commute past the symbol of American foreign policy everyday like it’s normal. Can you ever look at that building without thinking of Abu Ghraib? These thoughts of existing in the seat of American power seep into Ekko Astral’s music and performance: take a look at a map and see what lies around L’Enfant and Eastern Market. When Ekko Astral took the stage at the Songbyrd the next night, it was with a raffle going at the merch stand to raise money for TransOhio’s emergency fund in the wake of restrictions the state was planning to impose on trans healthcare that have been temporarily blocked.
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When I first heard “i90” I was walking out the door to meet my friend as the final notes rang out. The insistence to “keep the rhythm” echoed throughout my mind the whole weekend, along with the bummer thought that I’d never hear the song live. What band plays their eight-minute closing track live? Ekko Astral did when I saw them a few months later at The Broadway. “i90” is a tornado siren telling you to prepare. When people who have no understanding of the realities of trans lives escalate from blocking kids from playing sports to taking away life-saving healthcare, while the media apparatus ignores reporting on the facts of our existence, we have no one to turn to but ourselves. Holzman makes that clear.
As she took the microphone from her stand, she marched to the edge of the stage and passed it to an audience member with instructions to say their name and the biggest problems in their lives. After each introduction, Holzman yelled “again!” as the mic moved around the audience—unemployment, transphobia, ongoing genocides. “Again!” It reminded me of the introduction they’d given at a previous show to “pomegranate tree,” the unreleased, Fugazi-influenced protest song over the genocide in Palestine, in which they reminded the audience that all of our problems are interconnected.
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When I saw Ekko Astral open for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at Brooklyn’s Warsaw last month, Holzman asked the crowd how we were doing. A general rockstar question, but as the crowd cheer died down, she said, “No, really?” before probing the audience: “Do you want things to get better? Do you believe in a better future?” Ekko Astral genuinely do. They later call out how the politicians in their hometown don’t, because “it’s a place people get paid to kill other people.”
It is in these moments that the meaning of “somewhere at the bottom…” shifts from asking to be heard to forcing listeners to reckon with their discomfort when they hear about the ways our lives impact those around us. That feeling is highlighted most distinctly on PINK BALLOONS’ penultimate track, “devorah.” When introducing the song, Holzman spoke about how the song is about lawmakers in D.C. using Indigenous people as tokens when they collapse the epidemic of Indigenous people getting murdered and disappearing down into a neat acronym. In a live setting, you might miss the lines “And you never / Thought the violence could be stitched / Into the cushions / Of the couch you got in college / Or the lessons you were taught” in the noise the band pounds out, but Holzman made sure the audience caught the challenge the track poses by asking over the pulsing guitar intro to consider the harm our lives create. Do you know for a fact your new party shoes weren’t made by a prisoner in Leavenworth?
Something I’ve been trying to change in my thinking is to avoid slipping into a nihilistic fugue that keeps me from acting when encountering difficulty. Sure there may be no model of trans retirement, but I do sincerely hope to live deep into my 80s like both of my grandmothers. To deny oneself the hope for a better future assures it will never happen because it’s draining to delude yourself into thinking this is all there is.
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I went to Warsaw for the Ted Leo tour with my friend Stevie, the punk older sister I always wanted but never had. When we met, we bonded quickly over our shared love of Against Me!, which led to her making me a killer playlist of awesome bands I’d never heard (and I made her one with 20 Jeff Rosenstock songs). She also introduced me to Ted Leo, specifically recommending SHAKE THE SHEETS. When I traveled to D.C. to see Ekko Astral, I sent Stevie a video from their set, and her exact response was: “omg the kids are too cool these days.” So when the SHAKE THE SHEETS tour with Ekko Astral in support was announced, it was guaranteed we’d go.
When Leo finished playing “Little Dawn,” Stevie wiped tears away as she leaned over to tell me that she used to listen to that song on repeat because it helped her feel like everything was alright. That song offered her a glimmer of hope amid all the pain in her life. For me, “make me young” serves that purpose. When Tully sings with acceptance that the good in life comes with pain, I feel like it’ll be alright for once. It’s a mantra that I repeat in my head when I’m feeling dysphoric or overwhelmed by the state of the world.
Because this was the last show of the tour, Leo gave a big speech about how much he liked Ekko Astral and capped it off with a wish that they had existed when he was a kid. Ekko Astral is that kind of band. A band like Against Me! that comes out of the gates swinging and makes you equal parts furious and willing to throw your arms around the person next to you in the pit and gloriously scream the lyrics together. Ekko Astral is a band like Ted Leo and the Pharmacists that plays one song on a loop as the world is crumbling around you.
Ekko Astral is a weapon in the fight for a better world, and it’s one I hope you pick up and use.
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