There are few places in Washington, D.C. where you can hear a band cover SOPHIE, Mannequin Pussy, Bruce Springsteen, Joyce Manor, the Beatles in succession. But as the clock struck midnight and Pride Month began, DC9 was that place, and Ekko Astral was that band. Joined by a rotating cast of local and visiting musicians, the punk trio cycled through what frontwoman Jael Holzman calls “a fucked-up Russian Roulette” of crowd-pleasing covers, as well as a few originals—from early cuts off the group’s first EP to an unreleased track about a nation going up in flames. After two days of live music from indie rock household names and DIY newcomers alike, they had no choice but to go out in a blaze of glory, covering Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” with Berra frontwoman Roba Djalleta singing lead and Ted Leo on the guitar.
Less than a week earlier, about three miles away, President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—which would ban Medicaid and Affordable Care Act insurance plans from covering gender affirming healthcare—passed the House of Representatives. From its inception, this inaugural Liberation Weekend has stood in the shadow of the Trump administration’s all-out war on trans Americans. With the Big Beautiful Bill threatening to pass the Senate, the message of this new music festival couldn’t be clearer: No hesitation, the time for action is now.
In a conversation with the members of Pop Music Fever Dream less than an hour before they kicked off the festival’s first day, bassist Carmen Castillo tells me that growing up in the D.C. area and returning there casts her band’s protest music in a personal light. “The last time we were at Black Cat when we played our closer ‘18 States,’ which is a not-up-to-date account of all the anti-trans bills that were about to be passed, there was somebody breaking down in tears in the front row,” she says. “It was really sobering to realize the direct impact hearing the lyrics was having on people.”
Under the elevator pitch of “Pitchfork Festival for Trans Rights,” Liberation Weekend was the brainchild of Ekko Astral and the Gender Liberation Movement, a grassroots collective fighting for trans people’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination on a national scale. Also collaborating is Red Hot—an art and music nonprofit whose recent output includes the 2024 TRANSA compilation—and Trans Music Archive, an organization dedicated to curating and preserving the work of trans musicians.
With this two-day festival (three if you count a Liberation Weekend Eve event featuring The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman author Niko Stratis in conversation with writer Rax King), Ekko Astral and company set out to showcase the talent of a majority-LGBTQ lineup and fundraise for a coalition protecting communities directly under attack. With GLM as the recipient of all the festival’s proceeds, Liberation Weekend not only offered an opportunity for people to put their money where their mouths are, it’s also a call to arms, rousing the public to take a stand against transphobia and other forms of bigotry before it’s too late. And it turns out that the best way to make people pay attention is to make a lot of noise—and to show them a good time.