Before Ekkstacy’s music reached a wider audience, it lived in a quieter corner of the internet. The Vancouver artist spent years posting songs to SoundCloud with little response, developing a unique voice: melodic, shadowed, and emotionally blunt.
That sense of remove has stayed with him. His songs pull from guitar music, post-punk, indie, and whatever he happens to be obsessed with at the time, but they’re less about genre than mood. His music sounds like someone trying to get a feeling down before thinking too hard ruins it — direct and bleak in the same breath.
As more people find the project, he’s still guided by a simple internal rule: if he likes it, it’s enough. That has allowed his music to shift without losing its centre, whether it lands as existential dread, catharsis, or something more violent.
You built an audience online pretty quickly, but your music has always felt detached from trends. Did that early momentum change how you think about making or releasing songs?
It might seem like it was quick, but I was actually on SoundCloud releasing music for years to almost nobody. I miss that. And yeah, I guess I have been detached from trends, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Your sound pulls from different genres, but it doesn’t sit cleanly in any of them. Do you think about genre when you’re making music, or is that something assigned after the fact?
I try to pull feelings from everything I’m listening to or inspired by. Other people’s music inspires my music. I listen to music all day, never my own.
Sometimes when I like a song too much, I can’t record anything because I can’t get someone else’s melody out of my head. I’ll get stuck on a song for a week or two and think, “There’s no chance I make something that good.” It happened to me recently when I heard “Avon” by Queens of the Stone Age.
There’s a rawness in your recordings that people connect to. As your audience grows, do you ever feel pressure to refine that, or is keeping it imperfect part of the point?
The older I get, the more music I enjoy. I’m still not into a lot of refined, perfectly produced stuff, but I’m also not trying to be imperfect on purpose.
I work quickly, and all I care about when I’m working is how something makes me feel. I try not to think about anything too much because I’ll freak out quickly.
Your project started in a very online environment, but the music itself feels almost anti-internet. How do you navigate that tension now?
I hate the internet. I say that because I’m insecure and people are way better than me at it. But I do actually hate it and wish I never had to use it.
It’s fun at times, though — when I feel good about myself, which is not all the time. I’ve been sending reels on iMessage now. That’s the new method: copy them from Instagram and send them on iMessage.
A lot of artists in your position are pushed toward bigger, more polished moments. What are you careful not to lose as things scale?
My rule is simple, and I’ve broken it a few times, but for the most part I’ve been good about it: if I like it, then it’s fine.
If I genuinely like something, no matter how different or dumb it might seem to someone else, if I enjoy it then all is well. People are allowed to change.
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you want them to feel — not interpret, but actually sit with after it ends?
It depends on the song. Usually when someone has never heard my music, I’ll show them “Keep My Head Down.” That song makes me feel existential dread, but it’s also comforting, so I guess I’d want them to feel one or the other.
I have other songs that I’d want you to hear and start breaking people’s jaws.
Future of Music is about artists shaping what comes next. Do you feel like your role is to reflect a mood that already exists, or push it somewhere new?
I think I’ve already pushed it somewhere new, especially on my project Misery. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel like some people are, but I’m definitely in my own world.
What does success look like to you at this point, especially coming from a project that didn’t follow a traditional path?
Away from music, if I can sustain what I have right now, then I am successful enough.
I definitely want to play bigger shows, and I want more people to know who I am. I want to make a new record that I love more than anything else.
What are your thoughts on the future of music in Canada?
There are countless people in Vancouver, where I live, who are incredible, and I think a lot of us are going to do really well.
I’m going to list a few because they are so good: Passion Mango, Sophia Stel, Braydie, Jaxk, and Babyesko.
Chappell Roan performs onstage at the YouTube Brandcast event at Lincoln Center on May 13, 2026 in New York City.
Singer Karol G during the Monaco Grand Prix at the Circuit de Monaco, Monte Carlo. Picture date: Sunday June 7, 2026. 
Marcello Hernández attends the 2026 Met Gala celebrating "Costume Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 04, 2026 in New York City.
Albritton’s early sketches of Beatles George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo StarrJames Brosher/Indiana University
In the 2000s, Albritton used molds to make copies of her art to fund a nonprofit for struggling artists.(Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
The original Plaster Casters of Chicago suitcase that Cynthia made in the 1960s is now housed in the Kinsey Institute archives in Indiana. (Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
Albritton came up with the concept of making intimate casts out of dental alginate — and it became her calling card for years.© The Baron Alan Wolman Collection, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Albritton displays some of her artwork in her apartment in Chicago, where she spent most of her life.Jim Newberry
Later in her career, Albritton casted the breasts of female musicians.Richard Bellia
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?