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the 2024 U.S. General Election, Ekko Astral’s second album the beltway is burning was always intended as a real-time historical document in the form of a dark comedy.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.
Izzy True is a rock and roll band. The project gained notoriety in the Silent Barn era Brooklyn scene, before a long run in Chicago, IL, music capitol of the USA. Izzy True has recently returned to the east coast with a new Philadelphia based lineup including Izzy Reidy (Tenci), Andy Molholt (Speedy Ortiz), Phillip Price (Moor Jewelry, Noun), and Lucas Knapp (2nd Grade, Hour). They are currently working on their 4th album.
Comprador is the alias and recording project of Philadelphia musician Charlie D’Ardenne. Charlie has an office job but like most people who live in America, they are high key struggling. Comprador’s 2026 album “please stay off my ass” represents Charlie’s efforts in lyrics and soundscapes to deal with panic about our political future. The title alludes to how worsening social collapse makes cooperation harder or completely untenable because almost everyone is desperate and overworked. This is the aggrieved exclamation of an artist intending to defy our contemporary cultural situation and make songs that can sound abstract or confusing but can also intuitively embody unambiguous meaning. The music presents an accessible sense of familiarity without feeling manufactured or commodified to game a hashtag algorithm. The “please stay off my ass” canvas is slightly anachronistic and scatterbrained indie rock, the songs within as likely to go full shoegaze mode guitar onslaught as they are to overdub a baroque flute section or a dramatic music hall piano. Charlie performed and engineered the majority of the parts on the album, with a few guest overdubs from friends. Comprador albums tend to be solo efforts by necessity more than by design- if you don’t have the time to find an instrumentalist or the money to fairly compensate them, you can teach yourself and play enough takes to eventually record a listenable part. Comprador has adopted forced individualistic resourcefulness as a survival strategy not an ethos.
Charlie’s parents were pharmacists and as a small child Charlie was obsessed with dinosaur taxonomy. These early influences informed a syncretic songwriting approach that tries to process an unknowable and chaotic reality into manageable structures. Nameless suffering is symptomatic of disorders treatable with medications. Unremarkable rocks in the ground are fossilized beings with names, relationships, descendants. Bad vibes and hopeless problems are miniaturized and abstracted in verses and choruses, key changes, rhymes.
Various radio stations and online music magazines, including WXPN, WVXU, the Alternative, and Y-Not Radio, have featured Comprador’s music. Charlie also plays in several other active bands and has shared stages with Karl Blau, Dinosaur Jr., Home Is Whrere, Macseal, and many more artists.