Ecco2k Releases 'Echo': Six Years, 31 Cities, One Album

By Elena Vasquez

Ecco2k released his second solo album, Echo, today — six years after his 2019 debut E and roughly six years after he began recording and filming it. The album's protagonist swims in fountains, hears birdsong in his bones, cries about touch starvation and gets stopped at the border holding flowers.

"[Echo] is the most difficult thing I've ever done," Ecco2k, whose real name is Zak Arogundade, said over a video call. "It's been my whole life for the past six years. I think about it every day. It's not an accident that my life is like this. It's something that I've chosen. It was extremely gratifying, even though I didn't enjoy every second of it."

How was Echo made?

Arogundade, 32, built the album like a composer scoring a film, producing music from footage collected on his travels — an approach he first tried on E's "Fruit Bleed Juice." The list of locations ran so long he had to paste it into the Zoom chat: Stockholm, Berlin, London, Athens, Tbilisi, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Marrakesh, Auckland and 21 more, 31 in total.

The method was punishing. He visited some locations multiple times to re-shoot footage. Four years into the process, he began sequencing. The video for "Aldehydes and Ketones" compresses 30 hours of footage, gathered across five years, into four minutes.

What does 'Sky Burial' have to do with Hong Kong?

The day he shot "Sky Burial," Arogundade searched Hong Kong for antennas, zip-tied two pieces from a vendor together, and hiked into a cloud with no visibility and, as he described it, unbelievable humidity. In the video, he dances with a crucifix-shaped antenna under a blood-red sun.

"I do realize that it becomes biblical and symbolic, but it wasn't my intention," he said, laughing. "But I don't know. I fuck with Jesus."

whitearmor — Drain Gang's Ludwig Rosenberg — produced "Sky Burial" and the title track. Arogundade wrote many songs over those instrumentals until he landed on what the beats deserved. "Once I did finish them, I couldn't believe it," he said.

This was his first time executive-producing a full album. "I don't start every track, but I finish every track," he said.

Where does the album stand politically?

A 2021 trip to Georgia shaped Echo's tone. Arogundade visited a monastery in the Kazbegi Mountains and was heartened by young Georgians persisting as outsiders despite government hostility. "Since I went there, it's gotten so much worse politically," he said. "There's an actual real danger to just being who you are [there]."

He has always voted Left, he said, and criticized European nationalism and countries refusing refugees. "There's some stuff — like people being reluctant to call themselves feminists or to say they're pro-Palestine — that, to me, is kind of comparable to being like, 'Yeah, I'm a Nazi,'" he said.

What shaped Arogundade?

A Black kid in homogeneous Stockholm, raised by a single mother on benefits during difficult years, Arogundade grew up a punk who wore makeup. His parents let him be who he was. A teacher once called them, concerned about him and Bladee busking with a tambourine; his parents' response, as he recalled it, was: "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Drain Gang, founded in the early 2010s with Bladee and Thaiboy Digital, has since moved from online mockery to cult status — Yung Lean performed at this year's VMAs, and Bladee appeared on Charli xcx's BRAT remix album. "At least for me, there still hasn't passed enough time to properly see what the effects of what we're doing actually are," Arogundade said.

How does it feel to let go?

"I feel like I should be happy about putting this out, but I'm not really that happy, to be honest. I was a lot happier when I was making it," he said. "There is something heartbreaking about having something be your whole life for such a long time and needing to make it into this commodity."

He estimates 70% of what he makes stays private. "The project will kill me if I don't finish it," he said. Looking at all his unfinished material, he felt excitement, not dread: "It will take an entire lifetime to explore all the stuff I want to."

He is also, he confirmed, in love now — "It's not a metaphor."