The name was the first lie, and it was on purpose. When a depressed sixteen-year-old in suburban Vancouver started calling himself Ekkstacy, he wasn't chasing euphoria, he was building a costume for the opposite of it, the same way he says Batman wears black to signal darkness. Nearly six years later that costume has a GQ cover, a blink-182 stadium tour on its résumé and a catalogue that has quietly crossed 838 million Spotify streams as of 2026-07. But the most telling thing Ekkstacy has done to that costume lately is start taking it apart.
The Name Was Always a Mask
Born Khyree Zienty and raised across Vancouver, Langley and Cloverdale, Ekkstacy goes personally by "Stacy," a preference he stated plainly in a 2024 profile for 032c. The stage name was built around that nickname, a deliberately euphoric-sounding word wrapped around a person who, by his own account, began writing music in earnest at 16 following a drug-induced psychotic episode and a suicide attempt. His parents divorced on his first day of high school. He dropped out not long after. What came out of that period was Ekkstacy's debut EP, Negative, in November 2021, anchored by "i walk this earth all by myself," a stripped-down diaristic post-punk track that Complex covered within weeks under the headline "Double Negative" and that has since racked up 279 million Spotify streams on its own.
From Bedroom SoundCloud to 838 Million Streams
Ekkstacy is frequently mistaken for a 10K Projects artist, largely because he shares a sonic lane, and a booking agent in James Whitting, with label signee Artemas. The actual relationship is simpler and less corporate: he releases through Canada's Dine Alone Records in partnership with UnitedMasters, an independent structure that has held since his SoundCloud-and-TikTok beginnings. That independence hasn't slowed the numbers. His 2022 album Misery leaned harder into goth and new wave, his 2024 self-titled record pulled in Kid LAROI and Trippie Redd as features and landed him a Times Square billboard alongside that GQ Hype cover crowning him "Gen Z's New King of Sad Punk Songs," a line that has followed him into nearly every profile since.
Stadiums With blink-182, Then a Telecaster
The real hinge point came in the summer of 2024, when Ekkstacy was booked as direct support on blink-182's "One More Time..." Tour, the band's billed-final domestic run, sharing bills with Pierce the Veil, Alexisonfire and Landon Barker, son of drummer Travis Barker. Playing to stadium crowds built for a pop-punk institution exposed the limits of a laptop-and-loop stage show.
I had to really f*cking suffer for a while to earn that scale of stage.Ekkstacy, Kerrang!
He credited the tour directly with pushing him onto a Telecaster and toward a "real band" sound, a pivot that became Forever, his May 2025 album produced by Andrew Wells. Where Misery and the self-titled record traded in cold, synthetic post-punk textures, Forever is warmer and organic, a full-band record built after Ekkstacy relocated from Los Angeles and New York back to Vancouver, a move Exclaim! framed as both a geographic and emotional reset.
He built a name to sound happier than he was. Now the music is finally catching up to the truth underneath it.
What Comes Next
Forever got a 20-track deluxe expansion later in 2025 as forever and always, adding cuts like "chemicals" and acoustic reworks, and 2026 has already brought new singles including "Calm Spirit" and an EP, R-TYPE I. In August he plays Just Like Heaven, the Goldenvoice-produced indie-rock nostalgia festival at Brookside at the Rose Bowl, on a bill topped by The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, a placement that puts the sad-punk kid from Cloverdale next to the bands that arguably built the sonic world he grew up quoting.
He's been candid that the reinvention isn't cosmetic. In a 2025 Billboard interview tied to the Forever rollout, he identified as an alcoholic while also describing being in a relationship for the first time since building a persona out of heartbreak. He's even released a video bluntly titled explaining why he hates his old material. For an artist whose entire brand once ran on performing isolation, that's the more radical costume change: not a new tattoo or a new haircut, but an artist willing to say, on the record, that the mask doesn't fit the same way anymore.