Before moving the tassel on his graduation cap from right to left, Liam Hughes started a punk band with his best friend, Jael Holzman. For Hughes, the group doubled as a graduate thesis and a sneaky way to access American University’s recording studio. For Holzman, it was an opportunity to vent. She sang openly about her experiences as a trans woman, and those lyrics felt like a beacon for incoming band members Miri Tyler and Guinevere Tully. After releasing a 2022 EP under the name Ekko Astral, the Washington, D.C., punk outfit expanded into a five-piece with more on the line than just a framed degree: Ekko Astral’s community-building efforts in the local scene transformed them into a sounding board for DIY fans who felt seen.

If Ekko Astral sound brash and impulsive, there’s a good reason: When she’s not behind the mic, Holzman works as an energy and climate reporter, staring down headlines like “The Flooding Will Come No Matter What” even as her rights are increasingly being stripped away. Words spew out of her mouth as though the concept of a filter were laughable. But the band isn’t as reckless as its songs suggest. They quite literally sat down to brainstorm ways that their debut album, pink balloons, might foster a better future. What Ekko Astral produced was a collection of experimental punk and noise-rock songs that weld together two ideas: We’ve got to stop softening our opinions just to minimize others’ discomfort, and we’ve got to start having fun again. Ekko Astral apply those tenets wholesale to dinner-spoiling conversation subjects—the pain of aging, murder and death, the wretched anxiety of being terminally online—with beatific results.

pink balloons’ noise-punk barrage hits like a stray elbow in the mascara moshpit. Ekko Astral smear raw punk, distorted pop hooks, and experimental noise like they’re wiping dirt on their lids in place of eye shadow. Coursing through them is the distinct charisma of D.C. bands past: the chaotic unpredictability of Black Eyes, the palpable urgency of Fugazi, the commanding vocal control of Priests. Opener “head empty blues” is abrasive and unrelenting, stacking Tully’s thick bassline atop Tyler’s racing drums and the stabbing guitars of Hughes and Sam Elmore. There’s barely a second to catch your breath before “baethoven” begins, its ominous organ whirring behind a post-punk rhythm that catches fire the way a Gilla Band song douses itself in gasoline. Ekko Astral cut and push and warp, sneaking in panning vocals and submarine beeps that work thanks to Pure Adult’s Jeremy Snyder, who allows the band to level up with clean, layered production that doesn’t sacrifice their punk spirit.

Ekko Astral tear through their songs furiously, avoiding the post-punk cliches prevalent among their peers: social justice messages so obvious they’re annoying, repetition as a form of sarcasm. Instead, the band has mastered the art of casual erudition, doling out lines that are incisive but never forced—think Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner or Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely, both of whom Holzman admires. In “on brand,” Ekko Astral go noise-pop while calling out women who submit to manipulation, romantic or capitalistic, in the name of boredom. “She’s got a pair of cheetah print pink pumps made by federal prisoners/She likes to wear ’em to the seventies club, wax nostalgic about racism,” Holzman sings melodramatically, puckering the answering refrain of “so, so, so bored” until it turns to mush. Even when she uses others’ words, it feels like a handmade collage; in the unnerving spoken-word track “somewhere at the bottom of the river between l’enfant and eastern market” (Yes, that’s a reference to La Dispute, darling), Holzman excerpts a friend’s poem about the necessity of tense conversations, however uncomfortable, before building to a recorded chat about mortality with her late grandfather.

When Ekko Astral drop names, they couldn’t care less about appearing in the know or accruing social capital. Holzman quotes AC/DC and Kreayshawn alike, and references Lite-Brite and Molly Shannon without goading anyone to prove they get it. She takes a crack at mispronouncing Bon Iver 13 years after the internet overdid that joke on Grammys night, and uses Frank Ocean, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Carly Rae Jepsen as wordplay. When she does jab at pop-culture shibboleths, it’s with reason, like shading communist consumers who gobble up brunch and blast Beyoncé songs about hustle culture. Hearing a singer who isn’t preoccupied with topical jokes or outdated trends is refreshing. As Holzman explains on “Sticks and Stones” over a bassline fit for 13 Songs: “Nothing’s funny anymore/I wanna laugh at all the things/I don’t care about.” Though Holzman churns out plenty of zingers on pink balloons—“He skipped just one of her episodes and now he’s completely lost the plot,” she deadpans on “uwu type beat”—it’s “devorah” that uses every word carefully and cleverly. What appears as a serious, six-minute call for solidarity with Indigenous peoples subverts itself until it’s a parody of a parody, squirming at the idea of falling victim to your own hypocrisy through a checklist of blood-soaked goods: expensive shampoo, Taco Bell mild sauce, the fabric of a ratty college couch.

To position pink balloons as a trans bildungsroman is to misread Ekko Astral’s statement on our collective modern experience: Trying to be present and relaxed in an era of nonstop collapse and overstimulation only breeds disunity. The band leans so far past self-pity or righteous declarations that any mid-song statements that resemble queer trauma—“lots of us don’t make it home,” “dead kids in their bedrooms,” “I’ve got stalkers outside”—morph from personal earnestness into numbing realities. It’s bleak out there, but Ekko Astral aren’t trying to make you aware of it; they know you know. The power in their songs lies in the way the music gurgles up, emulating the acidic paranoia gnawing at us and encouraging the urge to fight it back down. Take from it what you will that Holzman shares a first name with Jael, an Old Testament heroine lauded for tyrannicide. When Sisera, the commander of King Jabin’s army in Canaan who’s holding people hostage, enters Jael’s tent and asks to be nursed, she picks up a hammer and smashes a tent peg through his skull, killing him instantly. At no point does she hesitate—is that even an option when liberation is on the line?

A brief flash of twee graces pink balloons in “Make Me Young,” where Holzman and Tully sing in tandem about trying to curb their pessimism: “Life looks down with sincerity and yells, ‘Mostly great but sometimes pain!’ and that’s fine.” This is the future pink balloons proposes: one where we can exist with the highs and the lows, but when it’s time to hit the sack, at least we’re still existing. Ekko Astral won’t waste your time recounting everything that’s gone to shit when the notifications pinging your phone already have that covered. Over the course of half an hour, Ekko Astral invite you to react to the news however feels right; so long as you’re reacting, the levity will follow.