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Oct 16, 2024 Web Exclusive By Caleb Campbell

“THE DISTRICT SLEEPS ATONED TONIGHT.” Those are the final words screamed on “Pomegranate Tree,” the latest single from D.C. punk band Ekko Astral. The words are a condemnation and indictment, coming after six minutes of build-up as the dusty guitars and off-kilter grooves of the track’s early minutes shift into a turbulent maelstrom. Similarly, singer Jael Holzman transforms her vocals from a numb monotone growl into a blood-curdling scream, packing a year’s worth of fury and exhaustion into those final moments.

The track is a sobering chronicle of the storm of emotions and experiences Holtzman and her bandmates have navigated in the year since October 7th and the subsequent military escalation that has left over 40,000 Palestinians dead. In doing so, the track also finds them tapping into a storied tradition of D.C. punk outfits speaking up in solidarity with victims of American policymaking, grappling with decisions made miles from where the band members live and work.

Amid this turbulent year, Ekko Astral wrote and released their debut album pink balloons, earning the band newfound acclaim for their massive and moving style of noise punk. Over the summer, they also parted ways with their bassist Guinevere Tully and guitarist Sam Elmore. The band are forging ahead as a trio with Holtzman on bass and vocals, Liam Hughes on guitar, and Miri Tyler on drums. With the band heading out for a handful of East Coast tour dates this week, Under the Radar caught up with Holzman and Tyler to discuss “Pomegranate Tree,” its themes, and making change through music.

Caleb Campbell (Under the Radar) To start, I wanted to get into “Pomegranate Tree.” It obviously comes from a very considered and emotional place for you two, and it’s coming two days following the year anniversary of October 7th and all the subsequent escalation. What was the creative process behind the track and how did it come together?

Jael Holzman: “Pomegranate Tree” is the culmination of a year’s worth of writing, rewriting, and iterating on a riff and rhythm that we started working on in the weeks after October 7th. The song grew and morphed and evolved over this past year, up until when we recorded it in late July at LaFam Studios in Brooklyn with Jeremy Snyder, who we also worked on pink balloons with.

Sonically, the riffs are inspired by desert blues bands. Jeremy got me really into Tinariwen and Mdou Moctar. The 11/8 lead that appears halfway through the song, that’s where the song first started. I just started playing it and Miri just started riffing on it on the drums and it really evolved from there.

It’s the last song that we wrote and recorded that had the involvement of Guinevere Tully and Sam Elmore, who recently left the band. And we view this song as the culmination of this past year of everything that we’ve been through, as well as everything that the world has been through.

For us, it’s a transmutation and a sublimation of a lot of life, a lot of emotion, and a lot of experience. Lyrically, it is a reflection of how we—as a band that is based in D.C.—view our bodies and our lived experiences within that lens. It is a song that we hope speaks to the feeling that a lot of people have. That feeling of, “Why the fuck is this city so silent and zombie-like in its complicity, in the role that it plays in fomenting genocide and fomenting militarism around the world?”

But, unlike a lot of people, we actually live here. We serve coffee, and we ride the bus, ride the train with the people who play a role in that, and how we interact with our environment is something worth noting. Talking about it is a story worth telling. And we did some of that on pink balloons, but really, this song was a stab at a different subject matter, a broader topic, and something far more immediate in its need.

Miri, do you want to bounce off of that?

Miri Tyler: Yes, and, to all of that. I think that a big part of what I’m drawing from—in addition to being in D.C. and the aspect of the culture here that is inherently protest, because we live in such close proximity to all the BS—but on a more personal level, both me and Jael grew up Jewish around here, in the Jewish community.

And I think especially around here, in the D.C. area—because I had friends whose parents worked at the embassy and everything like that, it was a very big part of my childhood. Insular kind of community, though, at least from my perspective. I still identify with Judaism, but not necessarily the Jewish community that I was raised a part of, because of Zionism, and how hard it can sometimes be for people, even in the Jewish community, to separate those two ideas of Judaism and Zionism. And to see one as a political idea and one as a purely spiritual one.

If you think that your spirituality is any justification for the murdering of thousands, including women and children—millions, I don’t even know where the numbers are at anymore, it’s so hard to keep track of—if you think that your spirituality justifies that, then I don’t want to be a part of what you think that spirituality is. I’ll keep what I know Judaism to be for myself, and for me, it’s 100 percent separate from the Zionist ideology that I have come to be against at this point.

Jael: That’s where the topics that we’re discussing really come to a head, though.

Miri: Exactly

Jael: DC, the Beltway, media and many political actors, folks in the nonprofit space, there’s a lot out of the echo chamber in Washington that spits forward the unfounded and harmful myth that criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitism, when I know for a fact that many Jews—American Jews, people that I’ve known, I’ve grown up with, my family—have been deeply skeptical of the Netanyahu government dating back to when he first spoke before Congress under the Obama administration.

We as a people, the diasporic Jew, have seen our spirituality, our religion, used as a political device for actors that have other motivations, and motivations that are toward a particular strain of Judaism that we do not all believe in. This is like saying that if you are not an evangelical Christian, then you’re not Christian, right? This is a nuance that we need to pick up as a country, that there is more than one kind of Judaism and we will not stand for genocide in the name of Judaism. It is not something that we will stand for, regardless of the motivations.

If you live within the Beltway right now, and you turn on TV on October 7th—I was doing that this morning—you turn on MSNBC, you turn on CNN, you turn on fucking Fox News, and it is wall-to-wall news coverage of one side, of one version of remembering what this week means, and you can see them now getting out ahead of it.

It’s been frustrating to see people from the Anti-Defamation League go on to MSNBC and open the week off with saying, “Oh, all these people are going to be taking to the streets and they’re all antisemites.” Some of those people are Holocaust survivors and the families of them. That is not antisemitism.

And that is a big reason why we felt so inclined, as two American Jews who live within this infrastructure, to devote six-plus minutes to speaking out to making a song about solidarity and about empathy.

It does feel like there’s a dichotomy forming, between what is covered on mainstream news and what you’re seeing on social media, especially as the pressure campaign from protesters and activists has ramped up. How do you be a part of change from the ground up?

Miri: I don’t have as much of the inside perspective as Jael might on this one, being a journalist, but I feel like it’s becoming so much clearer just because so many more people are catching on. Especially because Gen Z is not a generation of idiots, and they’re actually pretty smart and literate.

That dichotomy has been there for years. I went to a Jewish private school, and I remember being in high school and pointing some things out, some things that we were being told and that we were seeing on the news. And I was like, “Wait a second?” But there was always the energy of, “Yeah…but Miriam, are you with us or not?” You know what I mean? And so, that dichotomy has existed for a very long time and I think even if you were to ask Palestinian people, they could tell you it goes back probably to 1948 even. Those voices were being silenced or not fairly represented in the public eye.

Jael: What I’ll say is, that was a motivational factor for me. Just speaking on my own behalf, I’ve been through a lot of transformation in my career. I quit being a Beltway reporter this year with a pretty heavy degree of fanfare and noise, or whatever the fuck. And now personally, if I do journalism, I’m doing journalism that is intended to help people.

I do not think that many people in the seats that do that work today in D.C. are knowingly, as a part of their job, trying to help people. I don’t think that’s how they view their job. I think they view it as a ball and strike, write about what everyone says at once kind of thing. And that could be a problem if you and your democracy have at least one side that wants to end it. End democracy, that is.

Speaking to your question about impact and making things better, because that is what really matters and I don’t want to get lost in media criticism stuff. Ekko and the D.C. music community, part of the reason I’m so proud to be a part of this community and to know Miri in the time that I have, is that we dedicate the time that we have on this Earth to attacking the problems in a way that we know, based off of science and brainwaves, is designed to actually make an impact. And that’s with music.

We know for a fact that music is a special human device that can fucking change you. I could write a million articles, but a song can change someone’s mind or open up their hearts in a way that a million articles could never. And for us, the way to really make change is—if it sounds pie in the sky, hippy-dippy, I don’t really give a shit—is with a song.

So in some ways, do you feel like your role as a creative even outstrips your role as a reporter?

Jael: I used to say that those two things are wholly separate, but I think that was at least in part me afraid that I’d get fired for just saying something moral. And I think that, at least lyrically, what we try and do with Ekko is to speak with truth about the way we actually feel and the way others feel, and that is journalism. It’s not soberly quoting someone on the street, but it is an accurate accounting of how we feel.

“Pomegranate Tree,” itself, is an accounting of how we feel. Various sleepless nights that I’ve had since October 7th related to our complicity in genocide, related to the way that my previous line of work had me on the ground next to people who were saying antisemitic things in the name of fighting antisemitism, even. And plenty of Islamophobic things, and anti-Palestinian things.

Ultimately, in that same way, pink balloons was an archiving of a similar kind of feeling, right? “I-90” was about a drive down I-90, “Devorah” is about scenes that we’ve seen, [the QUARTZ EP] was archival of my own gender transition and sex transition. In that same way, the video for “Pomegranate Tree” itself is, for the most part, just footage of Washington, D.C., footage of the Capitol, footage of the White House, footage of the monuments, footage of aerial shots of the city. And a very brief clip of an interview with a fellow Washington journalist, Eric Michael Garcia, addressing the way that the Beltway ecosystem is complicit in violence.

And we just like to leave things the way they are. At least right now, it feels like so often people are trying to tell you how to feel. We’re just trying to show people how people feel. We feel how others feel.

Miri, you have anything to add? Because I feel like it’s so easy to get lost in the past life that I’ve had, but that’s not what Ekko is about.

Miri: But I think that you’re right on point when you talk about how—I’ve always said that no matter what your medium is, you’re drawing on your own experience and showing it to the world in the hopes that we can help each other relate to each other. And that’s all anybody is doing, ever. That’s what you’re doing with Under the Radar too, and that’s what I do in my songs.

I just have a very different perspective because I’ve never been a journalist on Capitol Hill, but you think back to the tradition of yore, it’s always been the same thing. It’s people just going from city to city, talking, telling stories in the forms of songs or poetry. Or it’s the marathon runners who are running from city to city, just to say, “Here’s the king’s decree.” That’s the same thing to me.

And it still is, it just looks a lot different. And to call back to what Jael was saying earlier, from my perspective, music is the most impactful medium. If you think of information as the sauce, music is the best noodle. [Laughs]

Jael: [Laughing] I’m clipping and saving that one. I’m talking about that in the tour van next week, Miriam.

Miri: Hell yeah, good.

Jael: If information is the sauce. Music is the best noodle. [Laughs]

Yeah, I definitely feel like that’s one of the reasons your music connects with me and connects with so many other people. I think a lot of the time, people have rigid ideas of what is “political music,” and I think that one of the reasons your music connects beyond those boundaries is the almost communal aspect to it. It’s like an airing of something shared and internal that everybody can celebrate together.

Miri: It’s impossible not to be a political band. Which is why I say it’s silly to label any band as political, because again, everybody’s drawing from their experience and their perspective. Whether you’re thinking about it that way or not, that’s affected by the politics of where you grew up, and where you exist, and what you believe in. Whether you are talking about it explicitly or not, politics is a part of life, it just is now.

Jael: There’s a lot that happened in my own personal life that influenced the lyrics on pink balloons and on “Pomegranate Tree” that I will not speak to in an interview. I don’t want to open myself that much.

But what I will say is, there was a long period of my life where I thought, as a journalist, simply saying, “As a Jew, criticizing the Israeli government or being critical of it is not antisemitism,” one, and number two, “So many of these people did not deserve to die, and that is something that we should be calling out no matter who is on whatever side of the violent military conflict.”

Those two facts, I was convinced saying that for the longest time, would lead to my exodus from journalism. That people would no longer consider me to be a fair and unbiased person, and that I would be unemployable, simply because I said that people do not deserve to die, simply because of their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, what have you. We lose sight often in this country—because of the way that the mainstream media bubble operates—of shared humanity and of the nuances of human existence.

I think as queer people, we can speak to that pretty profoundly because those same people that say it’s antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government will quickly say that it is somehow controversial to simply follow the medical advice of every major healthcare organization and say trans people exist.

These people have views that are warped by the technology they use, and the information streams that they have. Somebody should feed them a new fucking set of noodles.

www.ekkoastral.bandcamp.com

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