Following the critical success of his 2024 self-titled studio album, EKKSTACY, the 23-year-old made the unusual decision to move back home. He left Los Angeles, his home base for the past couple of years. He tried living in New York City (“It was awful, miserable”) before returning to the quiet solitude of Vancouver, where he grew up, and where his parents still live.
“Living here is lame,” said Ekkstacy—Stacy, when he’s off the clock. “But it’s comfy.”
The calm of British Columbia was a necessary respite. While touring Europe in 2024, Stacy fell into a cycle of hard partying. “A lot of drugs and a lot of drinking—psychosis” he said. Stacy had sworn to never do drugs after a bad trip in high school landed him in the hospital, but Europe reoriented something in his brain: “I was like, everything’s safe here.” That dark cycle continued when he returned to the States, and that’s when knew it was time for a change. “I was partying really, really, really hard,” said Stacy. “And then I met this girl. And then I was kind of like, I should probably stop.”
He wrote his forthcoming studio album, Forever, sober-ish—and in love. While earlier works were inspired by artists like The Drums, Lil Peep, Current Joys, and the Smiths— infusing Ekkstacy’s sound with modern yet doomy post-punk malaise—his fourth album possesses a
fresh sense of clarity and focus: a shedding of snakeskin. Renewal. “I wrote most of these songs sober as fuck in my house,” said Stacy. “I don’t want to write about my ex-girlfriends anymore. I don’t want to talk about the Bellas.”
Instead, Forever ventures into gnarlier, less detached territory. The guitars are crunchier, the singing more honest. “I just stopped liking the indie stuff that I was listening to and I just got more into emo,” he said, citing bands like Japandroids and Remo Drive.
Before, Stacy would write and produce all the instrumentation himself, only stacking on lyrics at the very end. On Forever, he overhauled his whole approach to making music by singing… with a guitar… which, to him, felt like a creative revelation. “Before it was like I was singing over this whole finished thing, and you can only really do so much with that,” said Stacy. “Honestly, I feel so dumb talking about this process, which is as old as time itself. But it’s new for me! I feel like an idiot talking about this, like, ‘Yeah bro, nice. You figured out how to make music?’”
Modesty aside, the resulting tunes are cohesive and unflinching—the sound of an artist entering his prime. Tinges of Japandroids are evident on the opening title
track, which hits with noisy pop-punk excess. Soft, pretty singing speckles everything, particularly on the stripped-down ballads like “Seventeen” and “Wonder.” And on the early album standout “She Will Be Missed,” Stacy cracks himself open and goes full send, oscillating between gentle near-whispers to full-throat lacerations that sound as if he’s about to cough up a lung. “I just tried to sing as hard as I could on this whole album pretty much,” he said.
Maturity is one of those overused terms that gets thrown around when a young artist breaks new ground, but there’s a real sense of ascendence on Forever. Unlike his last album, there are no features, no guest appearances, no gimmicks. It’s just Ekkstacy fully in possession of himself, harvesting all of the intangibles that made him such an exciting talent to begin with. Here he is on Forever: unbothered, happy, focused. “I just want to say this is the best album I’ve ever made, and I feel deeper about this album than I’ve ever felt about something,” he said. “This is the first album that I’ve made in so long that I’m showing my homies.”
