Ecca Vandal ‘Looking For People to Unfollow’ Album Tour | SECOND SHOW ADDED

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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 conversatio

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Ecca Vandal