Ecca Vandal’s route to punk was riddled with detours into sounds, cultures, and identities the genre rarely represents. Raised under her Sri Lankan family’s strict cultural and religious expectations, she moved from South Africa to Australia at a young age, where she was immediately thrust into the very white cultural pressures of her new neighborhood. Though she trained as a jazz vocalist at the Victorian College of the Arts, the kids at school got her hooked on the sounds of ’80s and ’90s alternative icons: Radiohead, Fugazi, Pixies, and Björk. There, she had the revelation that, as she put it, “Ian MacKaye is just as expressive as Billie Holiday,” and decided to translate that belief into her own music—despite not seeing any other brown women taking on that challenge.
On her 2017 self-titled debut, she dove into a range of rock subgenres: symphonic goth-rock, glitchy post-punk, alt-pop. After a few long years of touring behind that record, she felt burnt out—and by the time COVID shut down Melbourne’s music scene, Vandal was craving disconnection, a pull to go offline. She spent time with collaborator and producer Richie “kidnot” Buxton in that gap and began making music in his childhood bedroom, spending the day skateboarding before recording, and embracing an isolated and free-wheeling creative approach.
That unplugged retreat led to LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, her second record. Here, Vandal is in full bloom, pollinating punk with strange seeds and diverse spores, and cultivating a garden only she could sow. On “EYES SHUT,” she points to how innocent victims of war and unrest are ignored as those in power line their pockets. As she pours her anger out over distorted guitars, pummeling percussion, and flourishes of piano keys, she continues a tried-and-true punk tradition of calling out those in power. But she also takes the time to get introspective, offering a dimension of vulnerability that’s not always a feature of the genre. On “SORRY! CRASH!,” she enlists d-beat rhythms and sinister vocals to convey feelings of loneliness; on “BLEED BUT NEVER DIE,” she speaks freely of her menstrual cycle, adding new perspective to metaphors—blood; seeing red—that have been used time and again in hardcore songs. On the skatecore anthem “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE,” Vandal is at her best—snarky, biting, and optimistic—over spacious, gritty instrumentation. Her voice and ethos take center stage as she lays out a manifesto for music and life: that creative freedom, unabashed self-expression, and not being afraid to stand out have made her career, and latest album, possible.
At times, it can feel like the album is revving off into too great a number of sonic paths. “CAME HERE FOR THE LOOT,” for example, combines trap and hardcore under bold bars that unexpectedly play out like an Opium label track. But elsewhere, her stylistic combinations add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, like the bhangra beats that merge with atmospheric trip-hop on “THEN THERE’S ONE,” resulting in a satisfying, hypnotic hip-hop track that feels both modern and lifted straight from the ’90s. The song amplifies what makes the album such a captivating listen, as Vandal pulls from across her varied experiences and tastes to continually push back against sonic expectations. What could be more punk than that?
