Art d’Ecco burns it all down on new album ‘Scheele’s Green’

Vancouver shapeshifter Art d’Ecco has announced his fifth album, ‘Scheele’s Green,’ out October 23rd, 2026 via Paper Bag Records. He’s kicking things off with the towering, seven-minute opener The Death of Indie, a full-throated rager against tech oligarchs, paired with a wonderfully unhinged Loken Charon-directed video that somehow convinced thinly-veiled stand-ins for tech’s most notorious billionaires to dance on camera.

The single premiered via FLOOD Magazine, who called it a track where d’Ecco’s anti-big-tech screeds trade off with sax solos and other instrumental flourishes to drive the message home.

In His Own Words

“It’s the sound of fear and anxiety–about AI, and the disruption and uncertainty that this technology has triggered as it infiltrates just about every facet of our daily lives, including the arts. It’s a song that confronts the gaslighting we’re all collectively experiencing at the hands of these technocratic psychos and CEOs who are in it for only themselves and their stakeholders–even if it means annihilating their constituents, plundering the earth’s resources beyond repair, and destroying society writ large.” — Art d’Ecco

On the video, he’s characteristically cheeky:

“Despite our philosophical differences, acquiring our Four Horsemen CEOs (Zuck, Bozo, Dipshit, and Altright) for this video took some convincing. I get it, they’re rich, and they’re busy. But after weeks of negotiating, our production team was able to assuage their concerns and get them to pull up and do what they do best: DANCE.” — Art d’Ecco

The Backstory

In the ten years since adopting his musical alter ego, Art d’Ecco has cycled through several artistic skins — elusive art-pop architect, glam rocker, and most recently the louche late-night poet of last year’s ‘Serene Demon.’ This time, he questioned the whole project of making art at all, staring down an era of technocratic billionaires and societal collapse. ‘Scheele’s Green’ is what came out the other side: a reckoning, a rebirth, and by his own admission, an attempt to make people say “That’s Art d’Ecco??”

The album takes its name from an actual historical pigment — first synthesized in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, prized by the wealthy as a status symbol, and eventually revealed to be quietly poisoning everyone who wore it thanks to its arsenic content. Art found the parallel too good to pass up:

“This addiction, this allure, was such a rich narrative vein, the same way we can’t look away from our obsession with social media or other technological shifts that might harm us as much as help us. We want these things that make us look hot and give us status but it’s all a mirage. What if humans are just intrinsically drawn to shit that fucking kills us?” — Art d’Ecco

The Sound

Across ‘Scheele’s Green,’ Art fully sheds the makeup-and-wigs armor of his earlier records, writing bare and direct in an effort to capture a collective, shared dread about the future. He assembled a new core band of Vancouver-based jazz heads and music educators — Junny Chen (guitar), Olivier Leclerc (bass), Hayden Cohen (organ/synth), Kyler Young (saxophone), and Yato Noukoussi (drums) — and tracked the album live over two months with co-producer Eric Shea at Vancouver’s HippoSonic studio.

Partly inspired by Miles Davis’s free jazz era, the sessions leaned into loose, untethered jamming, layering in tubular bells and a three-hundred-year-old harpsichord alongside the gritty art-rock/post-punk core.

‘Scheele’s Green’ track list

1. The Death of Indie
2. Like Trilby
3. Catch 22
4. How Real is Real?
5. The Wolf
6. Scheele’s Green
7. Disappear Here
8. Break & Enter
9. Beware of Dog
10. Darién Gap
11. Endings for Beginners

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