Ankara Echoes

From a balcony in Ankara to the Babylon stage

The group is built around Mertkan Erkan, who writes the songs and sings most of them. In an interview published by Hürriyet on 18 January 2026, Erkan appeared alongside Özgün Aksüyek and İzel Susam as three representatives of what they described as a ten-person collective, and traced the whole thing back to a balcony collaboration between Erkan and the bassist Eşref Koçak. The circle widened from there to take in the brothers Özgün and Özgür Aksüyek and Doğan Aşkıner. The first recorded evidence of any of it was an EP, Echoes of Anatolia, released in 2025 and carrying the song that would do most of the heavy lifting, "Beni Al".

The full line-up, as published by Türkiye Gazetesi on 17 March 2026, runs to ten: Erkan on songwriting and vocals, İzel Susam on oud and vocals, Özgün Aksüyek on keyboards, Özgür Aksüyek on guitar, Doğan Aşkıner on arrangements, Erman Erdoğan on drums, Eşref Koçak on bass, Emre Gürsoy on percussion, and Paraz and Emrullah Çakay on vocals. Because the project operates as a collective rather than a fixed band, the personnel on any given record or stage can differ from the list on paper — a working method that has caused some of the confusion about who exactly Ankara Echoes are.

The live history is shorter than the streaming history. Their first concerts were booked for 22 and 23 January 2026 at Babylon in Istanbul, days after the Hürriyet piece ran, with dates in Ankara, Antalya, İzmir and Eskişehir following through 10 February. That opening run was played on a catalogue of one EP and a handful of singles.

The question that followed them all year

"Beni Al" spread through TikTok and Instagram rather than radio, and the speed of it prompted Turkish outlets to ask whether the songs had been generated rather than written. Türkiye Gazetesi put the question straight into its headline on 17 March 2026. The group's answer has been consistent: the compositions and the lyrics belong to the members, and artificial intelligence was used only in production — specifically, they said, at the mix and mastering stage.

Hürriyet ran Erkan's version of that defence as its headline — artificial intelligence used like a screwdriver, not as the writer of the song. His formulation in the interview was that the technology is a tool at the production stage, not in the composition or the words. The members also conceded something less flattering and more interesting: the suspicion itself did the work of a publicity campaign they had no money to run. A collective with no PR budget was argued about for weeks, free of charge, and the argument sent people to the songs.

The records

After the 2025 EP, 2026 was a year of near-continuous release. Singles arrived under titles including "Düşünmezdim bile", "Güneş gibiydin", "Ne kadar acı" and "Yeni Biri", running in parallel with a deliberate remix programme: an Afro House version of "Beni Al (Ta Ki Seni Görene Kadar)", plus remixes of "Ağlarsak Çözülmez İşler" and "Ah Yazık". The remixes are not incidental to the project. They are how a folk-rock collective with Anatolian instrumentation ended up circulating in club and short-video contexts at all.

The debut album, VOL BİR, landed in 2026 and runs to fifteen tracks, gathering the singles, the remixes and the album-only material into one statement. The most recent release at the time of writing is the single "Dünlerimin Naaşı", issued on 18 September 2026 according to Apple Music. Across all of it the method is the same one the band describes: Erkan's own songs set beside reworked anonymous folk pieces, with bağlama and oud pushed up against synthesiser and distorted guitar. Streaming services file them under folk rock; the band's own framing leans harder on 1970s rock.

Where they stand in October 2026

The numbers are large and no longer climbing in a straight line. Soundcharts records roughly two million monthly Spotify listeners, with the trend marked as falling, against 1.5 million plays on Anghami and 106,000 YouTube subscribers, both rising. Only about 2,300 people track them on Songkick, which is the more telling figure: the audience is overwhelmingly a streaming audience, and converting it into ticket buyers is the live project of the next year rather than a solved problem.

The touring year has moved through three distinct kinds of room. On 18 April 2026 they played %100 Studio at Zorlu PSM in Istanbul as part of the Garanti BBVA Genç Konserleri series, second on a double bill behind the Paris-based funk collective Echoes of Prince; doors opened at 20:30, the first act went on at 21:30 and Ankara Echoes at 23:25, with the show restricted to over-18s. Club dates followed, including Jolly Joker Bursa on 23 May at 21:00. Then came the municipal and festival circuit: on 1 August 2026 they headlined Ankara's own Kültür Yaz Sahnesi programme at the culture and arts centre in Kurtuluş Park, an 8pm start in the city they are named after.

Autumn has kept the same shape. Apple Music lists a 9 October 2026 performance on the open-air stage at the Del Lago Hotel in Sakarya, an unusual 3pm slot. Biletinial carries a 20:30 show at the Riverside Otel in Bartın, promoted by Antika Organizasyon, with seated tickets from ₺1,000 and 94 remaining when the page was checked. Listings also place them at Ooze Venue in İzmir and Hayal Kahvesi Premium in Denizli. Seven dates were on sale in early October 2026 — a steady, mid-scale run of hotel stages, clubs and regional halls rather than arenas.

The show itself

Nobody has published a long-form concert review of this band, which is partly a function of how new the live operation is and partly of how much Turkish coverage was absorbed by the question of whether they were real. What exists instead is venue and promoter copy, consistent enough across unrelated sources to be worth something: the shows are described as reconstructing the studio recordings with live instruments, layering Anatolian instruments over electronic textures, and running on what the listings call dark but hopeful melodies against unfiltered vocals.

The one piece of independent characterisation comes from Zorlu PSM's own billing, which described an ensemble led by Erkan blending a 1970s rock sensibility with contemporary urban sound and drawing heavy crowd participation. That matches the practical constraint of the format: ten people, acoustic folk instruments and synthesisers on the same stage, playing material that most of the room knows from a phone screen rather than a record sleeve. The sets are short on spectacle and long on personnel.