Ekkstacy

Ekkstacy (stylized EKKSTACY), born Khyree Zienty in Vancouver, British Columbia, is a singer, songwriter and producer who built a global audience from his bedroom, merging post-punk, shoegaze and emo-pop into what GQ crowned "Gen Z's New King of Sad Punk Songs." He releases independently through Canada's Dine Alone Records in partnership with UnitedMasters, not through 10K Projects as is sometimes assumed, and his catalogue has passed 838 million Spotify streams as of late June 2026. In 2024 he supported blink-182's farewell "One More Time..." stadium tour alongside Landon Barker, and in 2025 he pivoted from cold, synth-driven post-punk to a full-band, guitar-forward sound on his third album, Forever.

Early Life & Identity

Ekkstacy was born Khyree Zienty, with his birthdate most commonly cited as April 15, 2002, though at least one biographical video gives April 16, 2002, a minor discrepancy that has never been resolved by a primary source. He was raised in the greater Vancouver area, with accounts placing his upbringing across the city itself and the suburbs of Langley and Cloverdale. His heritage includes a documented but internally contradictory claim of Jamaican descent: Wikipedia, citing his appearance on The CUFBOYS Show, states the lineage runs through his father, while a fan-compiled Reddit fact list citing the same interview says it runs through his mother. The original October 2021 CUFBOYS Show episode is publicly available, but the accessible transcript excerpt does not clearly resolve which parent is being referenced, so the claim should be treated as unverified pending clearer sourcing.

He goes personally by "Stacy" rather than his birth name, a preference stated directly in a 2024 profile for 032c. The stage name Ekkstacy was built around that nickname: he has said he liked the sound of "Stacy" and constructed a euphoric-sounding name around it as a deliberate contrast to the depressive state he was in when he began writing, comparing the logic to Batman's black costume signifying darkness. His parents divorced on his first day of high school, an event he has cited repeatedly as foundational to his songwriting. He is the oldest of three siblings, and his father made amateur rap music, putting a young Ekkstacy to work producing beats on GarageBand starting around age 13 or 14. He picked up guitar in sixth grade, skateboarded through his teens, eventually dropped out of high school, and began writing music in earnest at 16 following a mental health crisis detailed further below.

The Come-Up: SoundCloud to Streaming Success

Ekkstacy's rise began as an independent SoundCloud-and-TikTok artist, not, as is sometimes assumed, as a signee of 10K Projects. He started posting music around 2018 to 2020, uploading an early self-recorded single, "Stupid Kids," straight from his bedroom. His debut EP, Negative, arrived in November 2021 and contained the song that defined his early career: "i walk this earth all by myself," a stripped-down, diaristic post-punk track that spread widely on TikTok and has since accumulated hundreds of millions of streams, cited at 279 million on Spotify alone in a 2025 interview with Exclaim!. Complex covered his emergence directly in a November 2021 feature titled "Double Negative," describing a fusion of SoundCloud-rap sensibility with indie-rock songwriting. He was reportedly guided early on by a team that had previously nurtured The Drums, one of his favorite bands; The Drums frontman Jonny Pierce later appeared on Ekkstacy's 2021 track "F*ck Everything!"

The 10K Projects assumption is a plausible but incorrect inference worth addressing directly, because it recurs across fan discussion and casual press framing. 10K Projects, founded by Elliot Grainge and affiliated with Universal Music Group, has signed and developed several breakout Gen Z artists in the same sonic lane Ekkstacy occupies, including Artemas. That genre and scene adjacency, without an actual contractual relationship, is very likely the root of the mix-up. A direct check of 10K Projects' official partner roster lists Artemas alongside acts like Ice Spice and Trippie Redd but contains no mention of Ekkstacy, and there is no artist profile page for him on the label's site. His recorded output is instead released through Dine Alone Records, a Canadian independent label, in partnership with UnitedMasters for distribution, a relationship confirmed by both companies' own rosters and editorial pages, and reflected in Genius' album credits for both Ekkstacy and Forever.

His live career scaled quickly on the back of streaming growth. He made his Lollapalooza debut in the two-year run-up to his self-titled album, and Dine Alone Records' own announcement of that record explicitly credits stretches of touring and festival dates for shaping its more expansive sound. The genuine link between Ekkstacy and Artemas, as detailed further in the Business section below, is a shared booking agency and a shared moment in a genre wave the press has taken to calling the darkwave revival, not a shared record label.

Sound, Visual Identity & the Post-Punk Revival

Ekkstacy's visual identity is inseparable from his sound: a moody, post-punk-and-goth-inflected aesthetic built around bleached or dyed hair, heavy facial tattoos and a stark, high-contrast visual language across cover art and music videos. UnitedMasters' own editorial coverage of his self-titled album era describes his "handsome features and bad boy aesthetic (face tats, bleached hair and all)" as part of what landed him a GQ Hype cover and a billboard in Times Square. His most distinctive physical marker is a pentagram-and-anarchy-symbol tattoo on his face. He also carries a "love" tattoo rendered in Russian script, inspired, he has said, by a woman who was never his partner but who left enough of an impression to warrant permanent ink; he has described the broader habit of tattooing himself as almost superstitious, marking desires onto his body in hopes of drawing them into his life.

Sonically, his catalogue sits at the intersection of two revival movements: 2000s-style post-punk and goth, echoing acts like Joy Division and The Cure filtered through a contemporary lens, and 2010s-2020s SoundCloud-rap-adjacent emo. His genre positioning has shifted between shoegaze, post-punk and surf rock within a single album, and German press covering his 2024 tour categorized him plainly as "Post-Punk und Emo-Rock." This dark, romantic, slightly theatrical package, heartbreak lyrics paired with goth-adjacent imagery, is the throughline connecting him stylistically to peers like Artemas, even though the two artists have never shared a label. Exclaim!'s 2025 profile frames the Forever album explicitly as a fresh start built in Vancouver, noting that after several years based in Los Angeles and New York, Ekkstacy relocated back to his hometown, a geographic and emotional reset that shows up in the record's warmer, more organic full-band presentation compared to the colder, more synthetic textures of Misery and the self-titled record. Guitarist Sally Boy, a solo artist in his own right, became a key sonic and visual collaborator across the Forever era, appearing throughout the album's live shows and rollout imagery.

Discography

Ekkstacy's catalogue spans one EP, three studio albums, one deluxe reissue and a long run of standalone singles, evolving from lo-fi bedroom post-punk toward full-band alt-rock production. Genius' artist page catalogues 128 total songs credited to EKKSTACY across his career.

Standalone singles trace a consistent early-2020s arc: "Stupid Kids," "Uncomparable," "Love," "Starry Eyes" and "See You Later" (all 2020); "i walk this earth all by myself," "I Want to Be by Your Side" (feat. Herhexx), "F*ck Everything!" (feat. the Drums), "In Love," and "It Only Gets Worse, I Promise" (2021); "I Gave You Everything," "Wish I Was Dead," "I Want to Die in Your Arms," and "I Just Want to Hide My Face" (2022); "Problems" (feat. Trippie Redd), "Bella / I Can't Find Anyone" and "Shutting Me Out / Goo Lagoon" (2023); "Chicago," "Mr. Mole," "Seventeen," and "She Will Be Missed" (2024). The standard edition of Forever runs 13 tracks, including "if i had a gun," "forever," "seventeen," "head in the clouds," "sadness," "she will be missed," "stain," "messages" and "what's wrong with me," per its Bandcamp listing. He has also appeared as a featured guest, notably on "Still Breathing" alongside HEALTH on the compilation Disco No. 4.

Business, Management & Booking

Ekkstacy's business infrastructure is independent-artist-oriented rather than major-label-driven, a structural distinction from the framing that sometimes pairs him with Artemas as a labelmate. As established above, he is not a 10K Projects artist. His recorded output is released via Dine Alone Records in conjunction with UnitedMasters, the distribution platform that also publishes editorial coverage of his releases.

On management, industry roster-tracking outlet Rostr reported in a "Roster Updates" bulletin that London-based manager Andrew Mishko and day-to-day manager Jill Irvine joined Stern Management in mid-2025, bringing a client roster that explicitly includes EKKSTACY alongside Witch Post and Alaska Reid. Mishko had previously operated under ATC Management before that move; whether the Stern Management relationship remains current as of mid-2026 has not been independently reconfirmed. For live bookings, Ekkstacy is represented by Wasserman Music, with agents James Whitting and Laura Brown handling his account, the same agency, and one overlapping agent in James Whitting, that also books Artemas. This gives the two artists a genuine, verifiable shared business connection distinct from any label relationship, and is likely a more accurate source for their frequent pairing in press than any shared roster claim. Corporate and private-event bookings are separately brokered through firms including Booking Agent Info and Celebrity Talent International, which list contact tiers spanning Los Angeles, London and Pasadena offices. No publishing administrator or publishing deal was identified in available sourcing, unlike Artemas, whose publishing is confirmed to run through Sony Music Publishing; this may reflect self-administered publishing, an undisclosed deal, or simply a gap in public reporting.

Milestones: GQ, blink-182, Just Like Heaven

Ekkstacy's biggest visibility spike came with a January 2024 GQ Hype cover story that dubbed him "Gen Z's New King of Sad Punk Songs," a tagline repeated across nearly every subsequent piece of press coverage and reportedly paired with a Times Square billboard placement. His self-titled 2024 album further raised his commercial profile through features with Kid LAROI on "alright" and Trippie Redd on "problems," collaborations that connected him to major-label pop and hip-hop audiences despite his own independent status. He was also selected for Vevo's DSCVR Artists to Watch program, joining a lineage of alumni that includes Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Conan Gray, Remi Wolf and Ice Spice.

A standout milestone arrived in summer 2024, when Ekkstacy was announced as direct support on blink-182's "One More Time..." Tour, a North American stadium and arena run billed as the band's final domestic leg, alongside acts including Pierce the Veil, Alexisonfire, Hot Milk and Landon Barker, son of blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. In a later Kerrang! interview, Ekkstacy described the experience candidly, saying he "had to really f*cking suffer for a while" to earn that scale of stage, and credited the tour with pushing him to learn guitar on a Telecaster and lean into a more "real band" sound that became Forever. His May 2025 album marked a clear pivot toward full-band, guitar-forward production under producer Andrew Wells, a stylistic departure that multiple outlets, including Billboard and Exclaim!, treated as a milestone reinvention rather than an incremental release.

Looking ahead, he is booked for the 2026 edition of Just Like Heaven, the Goldenvoice-produced indie-rock nostalgia festival at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on August 22, 2026, sharing a bill topped by The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, placing him alongside foundational 2000s indie-rock acts rather than only genre peers. European touring has also been a consistent growth engine: press specifically covered his late-2024 German tour, tying the "Seventeen" single release to that run of dates and citing over 4 million monthly Spotify listeners at the time, a jump from the more than 1.5 million cited in a mid-2022 profile.

Personal Life & Mental Health

The defining personal narrative in Ekkstacy's public story is a drug-induced psychotic episode and suicide attempt at age 16, during which he jumped from a window, an event he has discussed candidly across numerous interviews as the catalyst for both his mental health journey and his decision to start writing music seriously. He has been forthright in more recent press about ongoing struggles with alcohol, self-identifying as an alcoholic in a 2025 Billboard interview conducted around the Forever rollout, while also revealing he was in a relationship at the time, a departure from the isolated, heartbroken persona of his earlier work. Paper Magazine's 2025 profile similarly presents an "unfiltered" portrait touching on partying and mental health management as ongoing, unresolved parts of his life rather than fully resolved backstory.

He has expressed a complicated relationship with his own back catalogue, including a 2025 video interview titled "An Honest Talk w/ EKKSTACY. Why He Hates His Old Stuff," suggesting real artistic dissatisfaction and evolution rather than nostalgia for his breakout era. Despite the visibly dark, gothic aesthetic and heavy lyrical themes, interviewers have repeatedly noted a disarming, plainspoken, self-deprecating personality in person, encapsulated by the title of his own Interview Magazine feature: "I'm Normal as Fuck." The toll and reward of nonstop touring is a recurring thread in his more recent commentary: in that same feature he described entire German tour legs selling out and venues being upgraded multiple times over, a sign of rapid audience growth he treats with genuine surprise rather than practiced coolness. That relentless pace eventually prompted a deliberate reset, moving back to Vancouver after years based in Los Angeles and New York, which he has framed less as retreat and more as a conscious choice to write from a steadier emotional footing, telling Exclaim! that he did not want to "just be an idiot" chasing the same self-destructive patterns that fueled his earliest, bleakest material.

Timeline

Streaming & Audience

Streaming performance is substantial for an artist without a major-label deal. Per Kworb.net's Spotify chart tracking, as of late June 2026, Ekkstacy has accumulated 838,007,107 total streams, with 833,620,140 as lead artist and 774,689,089 as a solo artist, and is generating roughly 498,614 streams per day across his catalogue. Earlier in his career, a mid-2022 profile put his monthly Spotify listener count above 1.5 million with 50 million-plus catalogue streams, and a late-2024 German tour announcement cited over 4 million monthly listeners, indicating substantial audience growth through the Ekkstacy and Forever album cycles. Touring aggregator Bandsintown lists 37,641 followers on its own platform alongside 44 upcoming shows as of early July 2025, reflecting an actively touring artist with a sizable dedicated fanbase, while music-streaming social tracker Stats.fm records 336,910 followers tied to his Spotify profile activity. Exact current Instagram and TikTok follower totals could not be confirmed from openly accessible sources as of this writing; third-party trackers such as Chartmetric and Music Metrics Vault require authenticated dashboard access.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Ekkstacy signed to 10K Projects, like Artemas?

No. This is a common but confirmed inaccuracy. 10K Projects' official partner roster lists Artemas but does not list Ekkstacy, and he has no artist page on the label's site. Ekkstacy releases through the Canadian independent label Dine Alone Records in partnership with UnitedMasters for distribution. The real connection between the two artists is that they share a booking agency, Wasserman Music, and one overlapping agent, James Whitting, along with a genre-scene pairing in press coverage of the post-punk and darkwave revival.

What is Ekkstacy's real name?

Khyree Zienty. He personally goes by "Stacy," the nickname his stage name was built around.

What is Ekkstacy's biggest song?

"i walk this earth all by myself," from his 2021 debut EP Negative, which spread widely on TikTok and has been cited at 279 million Spotify streams on its own.

Did Ekkstacy tour with blink-182?

Yes. He was direct support on blink-182's "One More Time..." Tour in 2024, a North American stadium and arena run billed as the band's final domestic leg, on a bill that also included Landon Barker, son of blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. Ekkstacy has credited the tour with pushing him toward the full-band, guitar-driven sound of his 2025 album Forever.

What is unresolved about his biography?

Two details remain publicly unconfirmed: his exact birthdate, cited as either April 15 or April 16, 2002 depending on the source, and which parent carries his stated Jamaican heritage, with Wikipedia crediting his father and a fan-compiled Reddit list crediting his mother, both citing the same October 2021 CUFBOYS Show appearance without a clear resolution in the available transcript.

Who produced Forever?

Andrew Wells produced Forever, Ekkstacy's first full-band album, released May 16, 2025 via Dine Alone Records and UnitedMasters.

Does Ekkstacy have a publishing deal?

No publishing administrator or deal, such as Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell or Kobalt, could be identified in available public records, which may indicate self-administered publishing or simply a gap in reporting.

Further Reading

For adjacent reading on The Ring, see the entries on Artemas, Ekkstacy's genre peer and shared Wasserman Music client, and the feature on the darkwave revival that situates both artists within the same late-2020s post-punk resurgence. Ekkstacy's stadium run alongside Landon Barker and Travis Barker's blink-182 also connects his story to the broader touring ecosystem The Ring covers around that family and its associated acts.