"I'm not as cool as I used to be," EKKSTACY claims, studiously avoiding keeping his face in frame throughout our Zoom interview. "I enjoyed waking up a lot more when I was younger. I do so much now, and it still doesn't make me feel as much as I would have just hanging out with my friends behind the garage when I was a kid."
EKKSTACY, who was born Khyree Zienty but goes by Stacy, has moved back to his hometown of Vancouver after several years living in Los Angeles and New York. He's hoping to reconnect with friends and immerse himself in the city's music scene, something he's never really done before — but, "I really think that I fucked my head up a lot with, like, drinking and drugs and shit," he says.
Growing up in both the city's downtown and its suburbs, he first found success making lo-fi recordings that blended bedroom pop, pop-punk and post-punk. Now 23 years old, he recorded "i walk this earth all by myself" — his 2021 breakout with 279 million streams on Spotify alone — at home during pandemic lockdowns. Its spritely production contrasted with its melancholy message, which connected with a lot of people who were feeling disconnected from the world. But after performing it and his other home-recorded creations on tour, he wanted to write heavier songs for his first album, 2022's misery — songs that would translate to his live show. "It worked," he says.
Making last year's self-titled EKKSTACY, though, he hit a creative dead end. Programmed drums left him feeling "trapped," and he yearned for the possibilities that might come from playing with an actual drummer. "I hate it," he says of the record. "I didn't want to put it out. But I had a whole album that I had just spent a bunch of money making. So what am I gonna do — scrap it?"
The record "fucking sucks," according to Stacy, but it did open a lot of doors. In a callback to his early attempts at making Soundcloud rap, it included guest appearances from the Kid LAROI and Trippie Redd that introduced him to new audiences, as did a slot opening for blink-182, a band he previously knew little about. "Enema of the State is one of my favourite albums now," he says, "which it should be."
To hear Stacy tell it, his latest album, FOREVER, was nothing more than a writing exercise. Each album comes with a goal — "not a theme" — attached to it, of "what I want the album to do for me." For FOREVER, that meant making "music that doesn't have electronic drums," he says. "I needed to make a full-band record."
Stacy describes a simple creation myth, but a lot was going on in the background. Along with being the first album he's made since moving back to Vancouver, FOREVER was also the first one recorded in an actual studio. At the suggestion of someone on his team, he and his guitarist, Sally Boy, hooked up with producer Andrew Wells, who has worked with everyone from Halsey to Fall Out Boy. "He makes my guitar sound better than anyone else ever has," Stacy enthuses. "He was so fast. We would make, like, three songs in a day."
FOREVER is easily Stacy's most dynamic and sonically varied record. Many of these songs sound like an explosive combination of the Drums and Wavves, but he's also learned when to put on the breaks and how to push his voice into new melodic territory. "This record is the first record that I'm like, 'Okay, I can actually make a rock song, I can actually make a punk song,'" he says.
Thematically, he says there's little difference from one album to the next, because, "I'm in a certain headspace when I do it all." Loneliness, alienation and mortality, all with a tinge of self-loathing, are persistent feelings across his short but prolific career.
But nostalgia, particularly for a younger version of himself, is new, perhaps spurred by Stacy's return home to Vancouver. The single "seventeen" addresses these feelings head-on: "I kinda miss being 17 / That's the only time I fell in love / I think my friends liked me more back then," he sings.
When he was 16, Stacy slipped into a drug-induced psychosis that ended with him falling from a second-story window onto a concrete stairwell. "The last headline tour I did, I was being a fucking junkie," he acknowledges. "I ruined a couple of shows that should not have been ruined. My New York show, I blacked out before I went on stage. Then I left the stage to piss and fell asleep in the bathroom mid-show. After, I was like, 'Yeah, I need to figure myself out, dude.'" He was sober for the first couple of months after he left L.A., but "then I got into other shit quite quickly."
Stacy is frank about his struggles with drugs and alcohol in interviews, but he says he doesn't want that to be part of his narrative: "I'm just open about things that have happened."
On the day of our interview, he describes himself as "a mess" but also "one day sober." He adds, "That's the most I've been in months."
He's trying to be healthy. But he also lives near a bar where most of his friends either work or hang out. "I'm there every day, whether I'm drinking or not." The day before our conversation, he sat at the bar drinking water for three hours.
After the New York debacle, Stacy is pretty confident that he'll be able to stay sober-ish while on tour: "I take it so serious that I won't just be an idiot and be drunk all the time."
Still, he remembers being invited to blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge's green room while they were on tour together: "He's like, 'I've been getting drunk on the treadmill for hours, dude. Do you drink on stage?' This is when I was sober. I was like, 'No, I don't,' and he's like, 'You're doing it wrong.' I was like, 'Thanks, man. Thanks a lot.'"