Ninth Key

Two careers that had stopped being fun

Ninth Key is a duo: Joshua Landry, who records as Lø Spirit, and the rapper Ekoh. Landry's day job is the one that explains the sound. He is a platinum-certified songwriter and producer whose credits run through Motionless In White, multiple number ones at Active Rock radio with The Funeral Portrait, and co-writes with Papa Roach, The Devil Wears Prada, Silverstein and The Ghost Inside. He works out of Los Angeles and is managed by KMGMT, which also handles the band.

Ekoh came up the other way, as a rapper who built an audience without a label behind him. The two met over something trivial: Landry approached him about cutting a cover together for TikTok. They each made a version, kept working, and then kept working again on Landry's Lø Spirit material. Speaking to Loudwire on 4 November 2026, Landry described what the industry had done to the job before that — "It just sort of became a chore... but anytime that we got together and made stuff, we actually had fun." Ekoh's version of the same realisation was blunter: "I'd seen him online and loved his voice... this guy's absolutely incredible," and, on the project itself, "If this doesn't do anything, I quit... this is the coolest thing."

The pitch, in the band's own framing, is early-2000s nu metal and alternative rock rebuilt with current production — heavy guitars, cinematic arrangements, and Ekoh's rap phrasing carrying verses into choruses written for radio. It is a genre revival made by two people who are old enough to have heard the originals the first time and who have the credits to assemble it properly.

The catalogue so far

The releases under the Ninth Key name are almost all from 2026, and almost all singles. The streaming catalogue reaches back further — "HELLO LØNELINESS" dates from 2023 and "GOOD THINGS" from 2024, both products of the earlier Landry–Ekoh collaboration now gathered under the band — but the run that built the audience is this year's: "IF I WASN'T ME", "HAPPY FEELS LIKE", "NO PLACE LIKE HOME", "DARK TIME SUNSHINE" and, most recently, "ONE MORE TIME", issued on 6 November 2026 and listed on Apple Music as the latest release. The singles come out through Just Us League, and the operation is independent.

"HAPPY FEELS LIKE" is the one that moved. It is short — two minutes and fifty seconds — and credited to Ninth Key with Ekoh and Lø Spirit. It reached the Top 10 at Active Rock radio within six months of the project launching, spent multiple weeks at number one on SiriusXM Octane's Big Uns countdown, and, as of the Loudwire interview on 4 November 2026, had held a place on the rock radio chart for twenty consecutive weeks. During that run the band held three songs on the Octane countdown at the same time, which the platform treats as close to unprecedented.

There is no album yet. In that same interview the pair said thirteen songs are finished for a debut full-length, each written to stand as a single, with no release date announced — a decision they tied directly to being independent and having to pick their own timing rather than a label's.

Where they stand in November 2026

The radio numbers converted into tickets immediately. The debut headline run — billed as TOUR ØNE and presented by SiriusXM Octane — sold out on the day it went on sale, across five small rooms: Saint Vitus in Brooklyn on 3 November, Cobra Lounge in Chicago on 6 November, 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis on 9 November, Globe Hall in Denver on 11 November, and The Echo in Los Angeles on 22 November, after an opening night at The Masquerade in Atlanta on 1 November. A second block of club dates is already on sale for spring 2027, running from Reverb Lounge in Omaha on 19 March to SOMA Sidestage in San Diego on 11 April, with Longboat Hall in Toronto on 30 March the one date outside the United States.

The bigger development landed before any of that played. On 19 October 2026 Papa Roach announced the 2027 American leg of the Rise of the Roach tour — thirty dates from 11 May in Biloxi, Mississippi to 27 June in Auburn, Washington — with Ice Nine Kills and Ninth Key along for the whole run. The venues are a different order of magnitude from Globe Hall: Barclays Center in Brooklyn on 21 May, Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, Moody Center in Austin, Pine Knob near Detroit, Golden 1 Center near Sacramento, Toyota Arena in southern California. Tickets went to a Spotify Reserved presale on 20 October and general sale on 23 October, with a dollar from every ticket going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix said the band were "excited to introduce our fans to Ninth Key, a band we're big fans of" — a credible line given Landry has co-written with Papa Roach before.

That is the whole public picture at the moment: a radio hit with a long tail, five sold-out clubs, no album, and a thirty-date arena support slot booked seven months ahead of the record.

The show as it runs now

The opening night in Atlanta on 1 November 2026 is the only performance with a documented running order, and it is revealing. Sixteen cues were logged, of which eight were played and eight came off tape: a "Countdown" and an interlude to start, then "Return To One" and "NO PLACE LIKE HOME", a taped "Full Stop Hello" and a spoken intro, then "It's Not You", "DARK TIME SUNSHINE", a talk loop, an interlude into "Good Things", "IF I WASN'T ME", another intro into "ONE MORE TIME", and a final interlude before "HAPPY FEELS LIKE" closed it.

Eight songs is the entire recorded catalogue, played in full, with taped material doing the structural work between tracks — which is what a band with one year of releases and no album has to do. The result is short by headline standards and deliberately sequenced rather than loose: the hit goes last, the newest song sits one slot before it, and nothing is repeated or stretched. No support acts were listed on any of the November dates. Doors at Saint Vitus were at 6pm, earlier than the club norm. The band sells a meet-and-greet package at $80 on top of admission.

No professional reviews of these shows have been published yet, which is worth stating plainly rather than filling in. What is on the record is that every date sold out before anyone had seen one.

The question the arena run asks

The gap between what Ninth Key can currently play and what they have been booked to do is the interesting problem. An eight-song set built around taped interludes works in a room the size of Globe Hall. Thirty nights in front of Papa Roach's audience, in buildings like Barclays Center and Red Rocks, is a different assignment, and support slots at that scale are usually thirty to forty minutes of material that has to land on people who did not buy a ticket for it.

The thirteen finished album tracks are the obvious answer, and the May 2027 start date gives them roughly six months to release them and get them learned by a crowd. Whether that album arrives first, and whether a project assembled by two studio professionals holds up as a live band rather than a radio proposition, is what the next two quarters will settle. Nothing about the first year suggests they are short of songs.