{"product_id":"the-beltway-is-burning-red-in-red-vinyl","title":"The Beltway Is Burning (Red In Red Vinyl)","description":"\u003ch2\u003eEkko Astral - The Beltway Is Burning (Red In Red Vinyl)\u003c\/h2\u003e\nWhen 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the 2024 U.S. General Election, Ekko Astral’s second album the beltway is burning was always intended as a real-time historical document in the form of a dark comedy.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, 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.\nOn 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, 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.\nTake 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.\nWhere 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.\nA1. body generation  A2. lil xan goes to washington  A3. horseglue  A4. beltway  A5. wmata  A6. this is not a call to action but a lamentation on the situation at hand (or, capital riot)  B1. elegy for a system  B2. lovesick american romance  B3. dude with guitars  B4. sandler '36  B5. blood mountain  B6. comet ping pong","brand":"Ekko Astral","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47804500738265,"sku":"634457234871","price":23.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0586\/0468\/3425\/files\/81mG1GdIHQL._AC_UY218_ba3c7b19-28a2-4bf0-b1fb-7237d814f4f2.jpg?v=1771180006","url":"https:\/\/drownedworldrecords.com\/en-gb\/products\/the-beltway-is-burning-red-in-red-vinyl","provider":"Drowned World Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}