Ecca Vandal, a sonic contradiction drawing from Nina Simone and Fugazi alike, has released her Loma Vista Recordings debut ‘Looking For People To Unfollow.’ The album lands as the culmination of years of steady build — from a long run of festival stages and high-profile support slots to her recent Coachella debut, current Deftones tour dates, and a breakthrough single in ‘Cruising To Self Soothe.’
Anchored in punk, the record sees Vandal unapologetically reveling in her full creative powers with tracks like ‘Eyes Shut’ and ‘Dance In Debt’ leaning unabashedly into hardcore, while the album’s polyglot influences reveal Ecca’s journey — elements of bhangra flutter up to squealing guitars, heavy crunch gives way to d-beat gives way to skaterock harmonics.
On the titanic ‘Do It Anyway’ over a reggaeton beat, Vandal seemingly answers back to the famous Jenny Holzer line: “done with protecting every bit of me from what I want.” The album holds its disparate angles and its sound clashing tight, contained by pure punk heart — reflecting the time, place, and love it came from. As Vandal explains, the record is one of subtraction, cutting ties with what drains your energy and distorts your vision: “The systems. The trends. The illusions of connection. I find empowerment in being loud and noisy, especially as a woman in this global moment who grew up in a culture that told me I could not be those things.”
Recorded and produced by Richie Buxton and Ecca Vandal in Buxton’s childhood bedroom, ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’ was the product of nearly two years of deliberate disconnection. “We cut out everything that didn’t serve us — the timelines, the metrics, the pressure to ‘stay visible’ online,” Vandal says. “We tuned out of the feed and turned inwards. In Richie’s childhood bedroom, we built a tiny home studio, four walls that became a universe. The internet was painfully slow, so we were truly disconnected from the online game… that little room became our whole world for nearly two years. It held all our chaos and all our clarity, a little ‘playpen’ where we could live, play and experiment like teenagers again. We wanted to celebrate long-form, the idea of an album as a whole body of work.”
Born to a Sri Lankan family in South Africa and raised in Australia, Vandal came to punk via an unlikely path — from the soul, gospel, and South Indian music she absorbed at home, to formal jazz training at the Victorian College of the Arts, where classmates first played her Radiohead, Fugazi, Pixies, and Björk and effectively exploded her ideas of how emotions could be expressed through music. “To me, Ian MacKaye is just as expressive as Billie Holiday,” she says. That collision — a strict cultural upbringing pushing up against the wide-open expression of punk — has defined her work ever since.