genre rock

“Forever,” Prince famously declared in the pastor-like open to his carpe diem chart-topper “Let’s Go Crazy” – “that’s a mighty long time.” “Live now,” the Purple One urged us in song, “before the Grim Reaper comes knocking on your door.”

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FOREVER is also the name of the fourth project and third studio album from EKKSTACY, the Canadian alt/indie musician who knows a little something about getting crazy and living like there’s no tomorrow. Yet on the new LP, out Friday (May 16), he’s entered a new chapter: fundamentally changing his recording process, embracing a new band-centric sound and turning out his most energized and confident work to date.

“I wish I could have stayed there longer,” EKKSTACY – born Khyree Zienty, but known to friends and fans as Stacy – says over Zoom from Vancouver. He’s talking about Mexico, where he and his girlfriend have just spent a long weekend to celebrate his 23rd birthday and recharge for what should be a big year ahead. Now he’s back home, about to go to Los Angeles to shoot a fifth music video from the LP, and ready to talk about a record that he had “so much fun” making, with a lot of the credit going to his new producer, Andrew Wells.

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“I love that fool,” Stacy says of Wells, whose impressive writing and production CV includes Fall Out Boy, ROSÉ, Meghan Trainor, 5SOS and Halsey. “We just clicked. Our first session we did two songs, full songs, first day we met. I was like, ‘Alright we just gotta do it with him.’” The two met before EKKSTACY and his band went out on a two-month tour last fall, Stacy having written and recorded acoustic demos for most of the songs. FOREVER was done when he returned from tour, in short order. “With Wells, it was so easy,” he recalls. “Andrew is just so good at producing. We’d be finishing the songs in like an hour, hour and 20 minutes. It would be done.”

That hit-it-and-quit-it energy is felt throughout FOREVER, and it is in marked contrast to the way EKKSTACY used to craft records. Through his come-up — including the 2021 aura-defining EP NEGATIVE and its breakout single, “I walk this earth all by myself,” followed by his debut album, 2022’s misery — Stacy’s music mirrored that of some of his early influences. “I used to listen to a lot of Current Joys and programmed, like Linn drums and lo-fi guitars, sh-t like that.” Comparisons to bedroom pop acts with a surf bent, like Surf Curse, Current Joys and The Drums, were inevitable; Stacy even collaborated with The Drums’ Jonny Pierce on a 2021 single. “But then I got into a lot of emo,” he says. “I got into Remo Drive, and blink, and then a lot of Nirvana. I got to the point where I was, ‘Okay, I can’t make this anymore. I have to do something else.’ I was tired of the computer-indie sound, you know? I wanted to go full band.”

Stacy says he’d already reached the point of burnout on his old sound by the time he made his last record, 2024’s self-titled EKKSTACY. While it arguably won him more mainstream attention than ever, due in part to features from The Kid LAROI and Trippie Redd, he recalls that album as going through the motions. “By then I was inspired by other stuff. And I just didn’t think I had the tools to just do what I wanted really, so I just stuck to what I knew, and I was tired of that. It was kind of just beating a dead horse. I had really done everything I could do in that space, but I just had to make a whole ‘nother f–king album of it. And I was just like, ‘This f–king sucks, dude. F–k this.’”

He doesn’t mince words. I talk to a lot of young artists who, perhaps understandably in this age, are guarded in conversation. Not so Stacy, who lets it rip with very little filter, on everything from music to drinking and drugs to girls to – you name it. He has no qualms telling me, a decades-long New Yorker, that he “hates” our city, having spent some time here last year, before quickly adding, “It’s just not for me, I’m not built for it.” He dismisses his first full-band recording, last year’s one-off single “Mr. Mole,” with, “Sh-t’s ass, I f–king despise that song.”  And when I point out that he’s never done the most high-profile tracks from the EKKSTACY LP on tour – “alright” (with LAROI), “problems” (with Trippie), and the uncommonly sunny, buoyant “bella” – he bluntly replies: “Yeah, and they never will be. I don’t like those songs. They’re just so – cringe-y, to me.” Fair enough.

But back to what Stacy does like and is proud of. FOREVER offers the most thrilling one-two punch opening of any EKKSTACYrecord: the power-pop explosiveness of opener “if I had a gun” reminds me of a sped-up take on the old INXS chestnut “Don’t Change,” and its energy would no doubt be approved by the Paulson brothers of Stacy faves Remo Drive. It’s followed by “forever,” on which another of his heroes, blood-pumping Canadian countrymen Japandroids’ influence can be heard in a rousing, shouted, “Hey! Hey!” Later, the album’s standout rawker “she will be missed” offers a frenetic stop-start feel that isn’t far afield from blink-182, who EKKSTACY opened for last summer, a career moment.

EKKSTACY

Michael Donovan

But there’s more than just one flavor to FOREVER. There are gentle acoustics on “messages” and “one day I’ll wake up from this.” “wonder” serves up gauzy Beach House feels (Stacy is an unabashed fan of ‘00s and ‘10s indie) while “shoulders” — a C86-styled track that opens, “It’s summertime / You made it out / Soon I’ll be ashes / In the ground” — might earn a Morrissey thumbs up. There are two forays into shoegaze-adjecency: the dreamier “head in the clouds” and “stain,” maybe EKKSTACY’s heaviest track to date. “Yeah, I really love My Bloody Valentine,” he explains. “I was just listening to them a lot when I was in Poland. I’ve always loved that sound and so I just wanted to see what I could do with it.”

Other benchmarks for Stacy on the new LP include more guitar playing than ever. He shares guitar credit on some tracks with his bandmate and right-hand man in live shows, Erez Potok-Holmes, but he has sole guitar credit on most songs. He’s also using his voice like never before. While he is blessed (and cursed, maybe) with a sweet, melodic timbre that will never allow him to be truly screamo, on songs like “she will be missed,” he pushed himself with Wells’ help. “I wanted to really sing,” he says. “On my older records I’m not singing as hard as I can, and I’m really maxing my sh-t on this album. I’m at the top of my range a lot, but in a good place, where I’m really projecting.”

What hasn’t changed throughout EKKSTACY’s musical eras has been the angst. He was a SoundCloud rap-era teen, an acolyte of XXXTentacion and Lil Peep; the faded emo trap of his early single, 2020’s “Uncomparable,” wouldn’t sound out of place next to Juice WRLD. When Stacy turned a sonic corner and leaned into lo-fi indie, then came the real gloom with titles like “it only gets worse I promise” and “christian death” (a fan favorite). His brand was equal parts self-deprecation (“I just wanna hide my face”), melancholy and worse (“wish I was dead” “I want to sleep for 1000 years” and “I want to die in your arms”). If angst was your thing, and for millions it is, EKKSTACY was your man.

The disaffection is tempered a bit on the new album, but still presents throughout: “What’s wrong with my head  / How long can I take it” he wonders on “what’s wrong with me”; “I’m so sick /I’m so tired of everything” on “one day I’ll wake up from this”; and “can’t put the bottle down” on “stain.” On the wiry, propulsive post-punk of “sadness,” Stacy’s entire lyric is a recitation of generally not-good things: “Drinks, pills, nicotine chills, death, sadness and fear.” “I was just kind of describing my thoughts, and everything that’s around me,” he says of the compact song.

Stacy’s candor about his drinking and drug use is refreshing. I am no expert on addiction, but I believe I am safe in saying that, in general, honesty is the best policy, and the artist makes no bones about his penchant for hard partying, mostly with alcohol but with no shortage of pills and powder. “My thing is – I’m an alcoholic,” he admits. “It’s just straight-up, I am. I am an alcoholic and I’m functioning. Sometimes it gets really bad and there’s been times when it’s like, I can’t function, and I go into psychosis, and I start doing really crazy sh-t. And then sometimes it’s like I’m fine, and I just drink every f–king day, but…if I could shake that? If I could snap my fingers and not drink anymore, I would. But – I don’t know – the thing about drinking for me is that I just have so much time on my hands. And I have nothing to do really, so it just creeps up every day. I’m like, ‘Well, sh-t, I guess I’m gonna drink this bottle of vodka that’s on my f–king counter! [laughs] I don’t have sh-t to do tomorrow!’”

And, of course, there’s the road, which has tested the most disciplined of sober souls. Time and again it has roped Stacy back into wild living, nowhere more so than in Germany, where he enjoys an outsize popularity and has toured extensively. “I can’t explain it, but I love it there!” he says. “I feel like a god there [laughs] – I mean, no, I’m just f–king around, but I just love it.” Godlike treatment often means getting offered a lot of things that can be hard to turn down. “I did [coke] hardcore for like a week in Germany,” he recalls. “And for me, coke is like – I liked it, but I didn’t love it as much as people say they do. I’m a really anxious dude. Like really bad, I’ve always been like super anxious. So I would wake up and just be almost on the verge of psychosis, every morning. So once I ran out of Xanax, I really couldn’t do coke.” (We commiserate on the wonders of Xanax, and why it’s the wildly popular – and widely abused – drug that it is.)

But Stacy’s most recent visit to Deutschland may have been a breaking point. “I was just doing a lot of drugs and partying really hard,” he says. “And when I got home from it, it kind of transferred to me in Vancouver, like I was doing drugs at the club and sh-t, and I was just like, ‘Dude, I can’t do this.’ I remember I woke up one morning after doing a lot of coke, and I was just sweating and f–king freaking out in my bed. I opened all the windows in my house and laid in front of the window for like two hours, and I was having such a bad panic attack. ‘Cause I was on a bender for like a month.”

Stacy offers even more detail on his use of the anti-seizure medication Klonopin, along with a ton of alcohol (“I was going f–king mental. For like, a good month.”) before getting around to how he moved past this dark period. It happened during his Vancouver panic attack. “I called the girl I’m dating now,” he remembers. “I’d talked to her for like year, before we even met. I called her that morning, when I was losing my sh-t. I had really liked her for a long time, but I had never met her, ‘cause she was hesitant to come meet me. She’s pretty shy, and she’s just smart.”

During our talk, he mentions a Russian girl he used to crush on, who inspired him to get the Cyrillic любовь (“lyubov” or “love”) tattoo splayed across his chest – just one piece in a mural of ink that covers much of his body. Another woman, a fellow musician he declines to name, was dating Stacy in the early days of FOREVER, and helped him find his songwriting mojo. “She’s an incredible writer,” he explains. “And at the beginning of the record, I was kind of like, ‘F–k, like what the f–k do I write?’ Watching her write, it blew my mind. And helped me write a lot of songs. She would talk to me about writing. She’d say, ‘You take it so serious! You just gotta write.’” But no one has impacted his personal trajectory quite like his current girlfriend. “I called her that morning and I talked to her on the phone for hours and hours, and I was just like, ‘I need to meet this person, dude.’ So I don’t know, I just kind of threw the drugs away that morning. I still had some problems with pills for like a few months after that, but the hard sh-t I stopped.”

EKKSTACY

Michael Donovan

It’s been a wild ride. Is it any wonder that at times on FOREVER, Stacy longs for a less complicated time? On “seventeen” he looks back six years to a more carefree point in his life, singing, “I’m not who I used to be / And I hardly know this new me…I kinda miss being 17.” He echoes the sentiment on thoughtful closer “keep my head down”:  “I was young once / I miss it so much / Where did that go?” Simpler days. “Everyone was just happier,” he explains. “No one had jobs, and we were just kids, doing everything for the first time. The best day ever back then was all of us sleeping at one of our homies’ houses and getting hammered. And that was literally just peak life. And going skating.” At only 23, he says he doesn’t feel “old” as much as just “jaded,” and weary of the nonstop bacchanal. “I’ve just seen – so much has happened – I don’t even know what else I can feel,” he says. “I feel like I’ve just done enough partying, bro. Like, I feel like I’m ready to just be with one person. And this person I met is honestly like the most incredible person I’ve ever met.”

As for the year ahead, FOREVER feels like a record built to give EKKSTACY his most high-powered live show to date. Joining Stacy and Potok-Holmes on his upcoming summer tour will be two new band members, bassist and fellow Vancouverite Hannah Kruse, and drummer Sean Friday (Dead Sara), though he says they just may be “temporary.” And just possibly, Stacy won some new fans last year when he joined $UICIDEBOY$’ annual Grey Day arena tour, sharing a bill with the New Orleans punk-rap mainstays, as well as the acclaimed hip-hop adventurer Denzel Curry and others. It was a good look for an artist hoping to expand his audience, even if he had to warm to the experience. “At first I felt like I was such an outsider, that it was like, ‘What the f–k am I doing? No one f–king wants me here?’” he recalls. “But then we slowly started socializing with everyone, and it was sick, it felt like a little f–king society in there. And it was fun, after I started meeting fools, it was really nice. I made some really good friends.”

All that talk of psychoses, blackouts, anxiety and booze-and-drug benders has led more than a few observers in the past to worry about EKKSTACY’s health and future. But he’s quick to point out that he’s always been knee-deep in sad songs. As open as he is about his stresses and the potential pitfalls of self-medication, he’s equally quick to tamp down reading too much into depressive lyrics, and put off by the idea of commodifying mental health as a talking point. Not every tortured musical poet is necessarily going through it 24/7, nor considering self-harm – even an artist who once recorded “wish i was dead.”

“I’m just like – bruh, I was just a kid, talking like that,” he says. “I was just a kid, 18, 19. My brother is 19 now and I look at that fool like he’s a child. I just want people to f–king feel me. I want them to know that I’m just hanging out, and that I’m just normal. That I get f–ked up and hang out with my friends, and skateboard, and live normal as f–k. And I still stress about the same sh-t that everyone else stresses about.”

That said, FOREVER does feel like a marginally more hopeful record than Stacy’s past work. Even if some of the new record lingers on the past, its very title – also the name of Stacy’s upcoming tour —  seems to anticipate many days to come. It’s certainly more forward-looking than NEGATIVE or misery. On the moving final track, “keep my head down,” he offers, “I won’t stop saying that things will be better soon / Put my head out the window I don’t have time to be blue.” When I observe that the lyrics suggest he may be in a better place, Stacy, true to his no-BS self, quickly retorts: “I don’t think I am in a better place. I think I am calmer, but I’m still f–king scared. But I’m definitely more mature, and just chilled out, than I have been in the past. But I’m still nervous.”

Nervous, but apparently in a great creative place – he says he is eager to work on another album – and in a relationship unilke any he’s been in. He’s even contemplating becoming a dad. “It’s on my mind,” he admits. “I want to get married and have a kid.”

So yeah, Prince, “forever” is a mighty long time. Maybe, like EKKSTACY, we just take forever day by day.