For Ecca Vandal, punk was a way in – and a way out.

Born to a Sri Lankan family in South Africa, she moved to Australia at a young age, and faced pressure to assimilate. “There were just so many restrictions and limitations growing up in such a strict cultural and religious upbringing,” says Ecca.  “When I discovered punk rock, it was so much about expressing yourself against those boundaries, against those things that actually suffocate you. I realized that actually my journey is what I had to talk about. I don’t want to see Women voiceless.”

 Ecca came to punk from jazz training and music school orthodoxy, from weighty first-gen parental expectations, and other places far from the Melbourne home studio where Ecca first screamed her feelings into a microphone. “What I was taught as a child is the exact opposite of like, “Fuck it, I exist and I make noise and I’m loud and I’m going to take up space.”  Seeing Ecca’s kinetic energy live, the way she owns the entire frame in videos and as she sings “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE” – it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time where she was tentative about any of it. The singer/songwriter remembers “Just being so scared to make noise and say something. I wanted to exist as raw, unapologetic and brash, but also have beauty and poise and refinement at the same time. Those things co-exist. That’s what I tried to express with my vocals across this album. That, to me, is freedom.”

While punk is the framework of Ecca Vandal’s LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, it equally bears the marks of her girlhood spent traversing between different cultures: “The music that I was absorbing and listening to as a child was soul, gospel, South African traditional music, Sri Lankan and South Indian music. Then I moved to a very white neighborhood in Australia, and everyone at school was listening to guitar-based music.” As a teenager, Ecca fell in love with jazz, and entered the Victorian College of The Arts to train as a jazz vocalist. Her trajectory turned once classmates played her Radiohead, Fugazi, Pixies, and Bjork, effectively exploding her ideas of how emotions could be expressed through music. “I realized that I wasn’t going to get fulfilled by singing other people’s stories”.

For Ecca, the pivot from jazz to punk was natural as anything: “To me, Ian Mackaye is just as expressive as Billie Holiday.” Ecca’s punk-feminist experimentation began to take shape privately, a decade ago. She began making demos of songs she had written and, reluctantly, she shared them with her collaborator Richie “kidnot” Buxton. “She played me this song on guitar. I was just like, whoa, where the fuck did this come from? E just grabbed from so many different places. We just jumped right in.”

“Richie could record and produce alongside me, and it allowed me to play with these sounds that I didn’t feel like I was actually welcome in. I didn’t really see any other brown punk women or know other South Asian punk rock musicians. I had this conversation a lot around that time, I’d say, “Oh yeah, I do music.” And then everyone would go, “Oh is it soul, R&B?”. It was like, “Am I allowed to be in this space?”

Ecca embarked on her music career with a mission to weave all of her musical inspirations together and express herself with full-throated abandon, regardless of what seemed to be “allowed”. She released a self-titled debut album in 2017, which was met with acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone and NME. As they toured, the fanbase grew, and all the right things were happening for the young band’s debut.  Then, COVID hit, and Melbourne went into strict lockdown. Ecca found herself questioning where she was at with music, “I needed some time out. I just wanted to be offline,” Ecca explains. Meanwhile, Richie was in the proverbial woodshed, and then, “One day he took his headphone jack out and I heard some of the beats.”

Ecca was inspired, and eager to try to make a song.  Quickly, the two found out that recording Ecca’s successive vocal takes, when their entire building was home, remote working, on Zoom, was going to be an issue. “People thought someone was getting murdered because she was screaming,” explains Richie. They moved their studio operations a few kilometers away, into Richie’s childhood bedroom in his parent’s garage. This is where Ecca and Richie would spend the next year, offline, writing and recording the 17 songs that would become LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW.

For Ecca, something felt fundamentally different for her. “I didn’t know what it was or who it was for, and I was really okay with it. I didn’t care about bringing anyone in on this experience.” It allowed her a deep sense of freedom – from cultural and familial mores, from calculations of the future-stakes of being an artist, from what a brown girl on the mic is assumed to sound like, from the idea of any audience at all. Finding that freedom is what’s at the heart of the album. It also inspired the album’s title. “I’m not here to follow what anyone else is doing,” says Ecca. The unfollowing in the title is – yes – untethering from a digital world, but for the singer, it’s a signal of her energized resistance to everything everyone expects her to be.That isolation became a chrysalis for their ideas. It freed them from the eyes of others and nurtured unfettered creativity. The two would skateboard during the day, and then head to the studio where they’d spend long hours giving into first-thought-best-thought impulse. “We were living this privileged dream life away from anything online –” Richie laughs, “We were living like we actually were in the 90s.”  

Ecca stresses the purity of their intent, or more so the naivete and enthusiasm of just beginners they reclaimed over the course of their cloister. “I felt like we were teenagers and just having the best time, and we didn’t care if anyone knew about it. We didn’t have to tell anyone. We just had so much fun.” At the end of their garage year, the two began listening back to what they had put together, in earnest, and realized they had an album to show for it. “Towards the end of the recording, we knew this was coming to completion, and E and I had this moment,” says Richie. “We were listening back to rough mixes in the car and we both got emotional that that time was over. In that moment, success and failure felt like the same thing.”

LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, while anchored in punk, sees Ecca unapologetically reveling in her full creative powers. Tracks like “EYES SHUT” and “DANCE IN DEBT” lean unabashedly into hardcore, but the album 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, seemingly Ecca 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 soundclashing tight, contains it with pure punk heart – reflecting the time, place, and love it came from.