Ecca Vandal

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”

 

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.