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Ecco2k Releases Second Album Echo, Out Now via 9th. (Ninth)

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Ecco2k performing live in Houston in 2022, silhouetted in black and white at a microphone stand as fans film from the crowd.

Six years in the making and written across a period of near-constant travel, Ecco2k’s second album Echo is out now — a record about loneliness, longing and staying sensitive in a hostile world.

Swedish multidisciplinary artist Zak Arogundade, better known as Ecco2k, releases his second full-length album Echo. Six years in the making, written and recorded across a nearly uninterrupted period of travel, the album is now available on all platforms via his own label, 9th. (Ninth). Announced just earlier this week, Echo features recently released songs “Aldehyde and Ketones” and “Sky Burial,” both of which arrived with expansive music videos shot throughout his travels. The two tracks also appear on a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl issued in four versions, each bearing a single letter—E, C, H, or O—collectively revealing the album’s title as the records arrive in listeners’ hands.

LISTEN: Echo — ninth.ffm.to/echo

Recently, Arogundade sat down with Kieran Press-Reynolds of Pitchfork for an exclusive conversation about making Echo, the last 6 years of living the process and his genesis as an artist.

“[Echo] is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “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.”

“There was one moment where I was at the computer and had all my stuff open, and I was looking at it, like, Fuck, this is gonna take an entire lifetime. And that was a really exciting feeling. I think, yeah, it will take an entire lifetime to explore all the stuff I want to. And I think that’s a really exciting prospect, and that it will not necessarily be part of my career but is what my life is going to be, hopefully. Whether I’m still on stage when I’m a bit older, we’ll see.”

As part of the Swedish collective Drain Gang, alongside Bladee, Thaiboy Digital, and Whitearmor, Ecco helped found one of the most influential musical and subcultural movements of the past decade, with a cult sound and aesthetic. On Echo, he builds on those foundations while continuing to move into a territory entirely his own. Arogundade is the sole vocalist on the album, and all tracks are produced by himself or alongside longtime collaborators Gud, Whitearmor, Felix Lee, and Mechatok.

Echo is a record about loneliness and longing, about the struggle to remain sensitive in a hostile world. It is also a declaration of love for that world, and the fleeting privilege of being alive to witness it. Echo follows a vagabond character who wanders the world carrying a broadcast antenna and a crown of flowers. Moving alone through mountains and deserts, beaches, cities, and villages, he searches for signals in a world of overwhelming beauty and indifference, listening and transmitting.

Drawing on his mixed-media practice, Zak developed the music and accompanying films in tandem, often composing tracks around particular moments caught serendipitously on video. The environment and his camera’s perspective on it are at times more central to the story than Ecco himself.

Echo—in his character, in its form and its content, its sounds, textures, and visuals, and above all in the way it is made—is a process of perceiving the sublime in the grander environment and finding one’s place within that. The transcendent can express itself through the most ordinary things, and the sublime is so beautiful that it is frightening, Zak says. Perhaps because its vastness exceeds what we can comprehend in one body or lifetime, and to glimpse it is to confront how fleetingly we inhabit it.

The aerial Echo carries on his back is an instrument of communication, an escalation of recurring visual motifs connecting Zak’s projects: wind turbines in his debut album E (2019), electrical lines in his second EP PXE (2021), and now antennae in Echo. Across these projects, the songwriting has evolved from introspective coming-of-age self-portrait, through existential longing to transcend personhood, to, on this new record, an embrace of the vast world beyond the self. Echo has journeyed around the globe and written for six years to pull a message from something bigger than himself, a message from the world, which is broadcast on this record: a declaration of unconditional love for the beautiful, hostile world that might ultimately still reject him.

Tracklist

Ecco2k
Echo
November 12, 2026
1. Aldehydes and Ketones
2. Echo
3. Industrial Strength
4. Fæmous Vagrant
5. Plume
6. Cuban Heel
7. French Exit
8. Loveless Animal, Lawless Criminal
9. Encore
10. Held Overnight
11. Swimming in Fountains
12. Sky Burial

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Justice Score Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score Album Arrives December 11, With New Single “Pusher” Featuring Gesaffelstein

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Justice performing live in 2018, one member in a blue jacket leaning over the duo's stage rig in stage haze while the other plays at a keyboard to the left, their illuminated cross behind them.

Grand Theft Auto VI now has its sound. Rockstar Games and Justice have announced the game’s official score album, a 30-track, three-hour suite the French duo built to react to the world of Leonida as players move through it, landing December 11 with new single “Pusher” giving a first taste of its instrumental side.

Rockstar Games and GRAMMY-winning French electronic duo Justice have announced the official release and launched pre-orders for the Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score, out on December 11 via Because Music, Ed Banger, and Rockstar Games.

The Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score 2xCD and 3xLP – available in a limited crystal clear edition as well as standard black – features 30 tracks and a number of bonus digital tracks comprising a 3 hour-long suite of material from the game. All versions can be pre-ordered/pre-saved here.

Hand-selected for the assignment, Justice (Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) worked in close collaboration with the team at Rockstar Games to match the thematic beats of the gameplay experience, fine tuning their signature sound to align with the immersive world of Grand Theft Auto VI and the story of Jason and Lucia. As a result, the band’s score is dynamically tuned to game events as they unfold, constantly reacting in response to the different ways players engage with the people and places across Leonida.

“The scope of the game is so large geographically and thematically that it was clear from the beginning the music would also have to be very broad in terms of emotions, genres, and textures” states de Rosnay. “We were given the freedom to explore as many things as we needed to, musically speaking.”

The duo previewed the score via their massive hit “Flower In a Hurricane (ft. Tame Impala, SZA, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard),” which marked Justice’s first non-feature song to hit the Billboard Hot 100 at #62 and debuted at #34 on the US Alternative Radio chart. Today they share another taste of the album with “Pusher,” a preview of the instrumental side of the score featuring their first-ever collaboration with fellow French electronic music pioneer Gesaffelstein. Listen here.

Justice emerged nearly 20 years ago under the iconic Parisian labels Ed Banger Records and Because Music with the groundbreaking single “Waters of Nazareth,” gaining acclaim following their influential debut album featuring the global hit “D.A.N.C.E.” The score represents the next major step for Justice following the massive Hyperdrama campaign, which kicked off with a stage-closing set at Coachella and concluded with a massive arena tour of the US, with a stop along the way to win a Grammy for Best Electronic Recording.

Justice will appear for a DJ set at Simifest in Mexico City on December 5, find tickets here.

Pre-order / Pre-save Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score: justice.lnk.to/gtaoriginalscore
Stream “Pusher” ft. Gesaffelstein: justice.lnk.to/Pusher
Stream “Flower In a Hurricane” ft. SZA, Tame Impala, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: justice.lnk.to/flowerinahurricane

About Justice

Justice emerged from Paris in the mid-2000s. As the flagship act of Ed Banger Records, they brought a switch-blade edge to the city’s dance music scene. The duo—Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay—gained global acclaim with hits like “D.A.N.C.E.” and multiple Grammy wins, influencing countless artists while staying true to their experimental roots. Their fourth album, Hyperdrama, stands as an ambitious fusion of French touch, space jazz, and hardcore techno, featuring Tame Impala on the Grammy-winning single “Neverender” and Miguel. Following the release of Hyperdrama, Justice launched a massive world tour spanning over 100 dates, anchored by headline performances at major festivals including Coachella, Glastonbury, and Primavera Sound.

About Rockstar Games

Founded by Sam Houser in 1998, Rockstar Games pioneered the open-world genre of video games with the launch of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. The series’ most recent iteration, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold-in over 230 million units alone. Alongside the other blockbuster entries in the series including Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto has become one of the biggest-selling and most critically acclaimed and influential properties in modern entertainment, selling nearly 475 million units. Rockstar Games’ blockbuster Western series, Red Dead Redemption has sold-in nearly 116 million units worldwide to date, with its most recent release, Red Dead Redemption 2, breaking new ground in fidelity and immersion. The next Rockstar Games release is Grand Theft Auto VI.

About Grand Theft Auto VI

Vice City, USA. Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Pre-orders are available now.

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