📰 A Chaotic Weekend With Ekkstacy, Gen Z’s New King of Sad Punk Songs 📰

STORY

Las Vegas’s When We Were Young festival is mostly a gathering of nostalgia acts, pop punk bands who peaked in the aughts like the Offspring and Yellowcard. Then there’s Ekkstacy, a 21-year-old Canadian artist with an anarchy star tattoo on his face and a sound that blends indie rock with SoundCloud rap. In this deeply felt profile, Chris Gayomali spends a wild weekend on the road with the young singer, much of which is spent desperately searching for a cortisone shot to remedy his ailing vocal cords. Chris came of age listening to the festival’s older acts, but when he first heard an Ekkstacy track earlier this year, he was floored. “It was one of the most beautiful and transportive songs I’ve heard in years,” he writes. “It lulls you back to a time when cruising around aimlessly with your friends while listening to music was the most life-affirming thing you could do.” This story reminds us that there’s nothing like a great love song to cut across genres and generations. —Alex Hoyt, articles editor

A Chaotic Weekend With Ekkstacy, Gen Z’s New King of Sad Punk Songs 

By Chris Gayomali

Night one, everyone agrees, was a total nightmare.

The scene: The When We Were Young music festival, in Las Vegas, the world’s foremost emo-and-pop-punk revivalist destination where the twin forces of nostalgia and capitalism convene to coax bands that peaked in the 2000s—acts like Yellowcard and the Offspring and Bowling for Soup—out of their McMansions for two days of performances in front of a vast ocean of elder millennials who once had gauges and lip piercings but now get sleepy after two beers.

The dilemma: It’s nearly 3 p.m. on Sunday and his voice is gone. That would be the voice belonging to the ascendant 21-year-old singer—songwriter Ekkstacy, who, along with his band, represents one of the handful of young acts appearing at the festival—here ostensibly to provide variety and also because they can stay up past 10 and fill the later time slots. But there was trouble last night as Ekkstacy’s voice started to fray three songs into his set. Ekkstacy, by his own admission, “sounded like shit.” It was a bummer of the highest magnitude.

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