Words by Ali Shutler
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Nine years ago, Ecca Vandal came out snarling. Her self-titled debut album introduced the unapologetic artist with a swaggering collection of rock-rap bangers that saw her rightfully championed as one of the most exciting new voices in heavy music. As her profile grew, she opened for Queens Of The Stone Age across Australia and performed at both Download and Reading & Leeds festivals. There were collaborations with Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén, Letlive’s Jason Aalon Butler, Sampa The Great and the team behind hugely popular online battle arena game League Of Legends.
As that success built, people started queuing up to give Vandal unsolicited advice on how to capitalise on that crossover hype. Those pearls of wisdom included sticking to one genre or teaming up with the sort of high-profile producer who would charge her $50,000 to work together. Feeling pressured to do something different, she and co-writer/producer Richie “Kidnot” Buxton headed to Los Angeles to take part in some pop writing sessions to see if anything would come from it. They would typically start with the pair being played a handful of familiar tracks the writers wanted to emulate, before they’d try and get things wrapped up as quickly as possible.
Vandal rapidly realised that way of working wasn’t for her: “It was all very surface-level and formulaic. I was just bored by it.” Neither did she find what was happening in the wider music world of much interest, either. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nostalgic guitar music started having a resurgence, and she watched peers hop on trends to try to stay relevant. “It felt like the world was only interested in 15-second snippets of music,” she explains. “It was just a lot of bullshit that left me asking, ‘Where is the art in all this and where are the art lovers?’”
Those frustrations got to the point where Vandal didn’t know if she wanted to make music anymore because “it had all started to feel really uninspiring”. So, while the excitement around her was still buzzing, she made the “very intentional” decision to go offline completely. “I wanted to tune out all the noise,” she says. There was no notes app explanation; she just ghosted us.
Instead of doomscrolling or worrying about hitting pause on her career, she spent her days learning to skateboard with Buxton instead. After nailing her first ollie, she started practising dropping in – AKA a leap of faith shift in balance that would take her from the top of a ramp to the ground, hopefully without injury. “It was extremely scary, but I learned to trust myself and my abilities,” says Vandal, who still skates regularly. Afterwards, the pair would head to the garage behind Buxton’s parents’ house to work on song ideas together. “I took those [skatepark] lessons into the studio and applied them to my songwriting. We’ve got all the ingredients here to create something that will feel good; we just need to trust that it will land. I just felt so free.”
“[My music is] against the grain, but that’s just what I’m like as a person”
Even getting to the point of releasing her debut album was quite the journey for Vandal. Born and raised in South Africa to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, she grew up listening to traditional music from both cultures. When the family relocated to Melbourne, Australia, she started studying classical music on violin and piano because that was an “acceptable” hobby to pursue. Later, she got obsessed with jazz and soul singers such as Nat King Cole and Whitney Houston via her older sister’s record collection.
Her plan was to study business after high school, until her music teacher suggested she try out for the nearby Victorian College Of The Arts’ jazz course. “I didn’t even know you could go to university and study the arts,” she says now. Always up for a challenge, she auditioned in secret and ended up getting accepted. “It was an awkward conversation [to have with my parents],” she recalls, “and it still is a little awkward. It was very hard for them to understand why I’d want to not follow the route of financial security and go in the complete opposite direction. But I wasn’t taking no for an answer. I just knew instinctively that I was going to be very unhappy working in an office every day.”
It was while at university that she met Buxton, who introduced her to hardcore and alternative rock via the music of Pixies, Bad Brains, Black Flag and Minor Threat. “There was something about punk music that really resonated with me in a similar way to jazz. There’s dissonance, there’s discord, there’s distortion, but there’s also beauty, control and restraint,” she explains. The “raw expression” in the music she was discovering struck a chord with her and pushed her to start making her own.
Using GarageBand, she recorded some “horrible” sounding demos that laid the foundations for 2017’s ‘Ecca Vandal’. Soon after the record was released, Vandal found herself touring the world and being offered a number of “great opportunities” that were beyond her wildest dreams. “It was such a great time in our lives,” she says.
After spending some much-needed time off the grid and out of the spotlight, Vandal made her return in 2024 with ‘Bleed But Never Die’, a furiously celebratory track about the strength of women. “It was written at a time when I was trying to understand my own femininity,” she explains. “It just felt right as the first song back.” The excitable response proved that people hadn’t forgotten about her, and six months later, ’90s-inspired rock banger ‘Cruising To Self Soothe’ took things to a whole new level.
At the time the song was released, Vandal had 11,000 followers on Instagram and thought about half of them would be into it because “it just has some sauce to it”. It travelled far further than she thought it would, though, and became a bona fide TikTok smash, helped by a stint supporting Limp Bizkit on their 2025 US headline run. At the time of writing, the song has more than 9million Spotify streams, while her Instagram following has skyrocketed to over 400,000. “The whole thing has taken me by surprise,” she beams.
Fred Durst isn’t the only famous Ecca Vandal fan, either. Both Garbage’s Shirley Manson and Paramore’s Hayley Williams have praised her on social media and have hyped her up in her DMs. “They’re all pioneers who have sledgehammered their way through and are always unapologetically themselves. I don’t feel like I’m carrying the torch. I just feel like they’ve opened up the gate and given me the keys,” says Vandal, who’s been told not to change a thing by them.
“I just feel very supported and understood by those three artists,” she continues. “They’re showing up in such practical ways, too, which is really beautiful.” She’s spent the past few months making some “big decisions” about who to work with in the US, and her fellow musicians have only been a phone call away. “I really did need their guidance.”
“I want people to feel powerful and like they’re able to speak up”
She felt just as understood while supporting Deftones on their first major Australian tour in almost a decade earlier this month. Despite a couple of viral hits under her belt, she had been expecting to play to indifferent moshers in mostly empty arenas as “that’s usually the deal when you’re the support act”. To her surprise, though, the Aussie crowds turned up en masse and ready to rage. “I’ve been blown away by the energy,” she grins, tucked away in a quiet corner backstage. Most of her set was then-unreleased tracks from her long-awaited second album, ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’, and seeing it connect was “incredibly validating”. It was the same when she made her Coachella debut in April. “It’s been magical and surreal. I just feel really lucky to be here.”
Riding that wave of renewed attention, Vandal shared ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’ in May. The record, which NME called a “potent reintroduction” in a four-star review, is marked by effortless leaps between musical styles – opener ‘Airplane Mode’ is a dreamy instrumental soundscape that launches into the ferocious punk rager ‘Eyes Shut’. The rest of its 17 tracks are just as eclectic, taking inspiration from the artists that have consistently moved Vandal and Buxton over the years – from Fugazi to Aphex Twin; Ella Fitzgerald to A Tribe Called Quest.
Vandal wanted to push her voice to match the different sonic and emotional moods on the record as well. While her debut saw her relying on rapped vocals, ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’ mostly finds the artist singing, along with the occasional guttural scream. “I’m definitely more comfortable with what I’m saying [on this record]. I believe it more,” she explains. “There are songs about believing in yourself, while others come from a place of loneliness, disconnect and sitting with your sadness.” Euphoric party tracks rub shoulders with fiery protest anthems, a reflection of how “humans go through so much”. “Why not express it all?” Vandal reasons.
The record, Vandal says, is about “working out how to exist in this world, written through the lens of a [woman of colour] who’s grown up in three different countries and is trying to find her own identity in all of that”. Although she explains that the album isn’t “talking about specific things that are happening in the news right now”, she does acknowledge it is “a little bit political”: “Sometimes just existing is a political statement.”
That comes through most explicitly on the sneering hip-funk of ‘Ghosts’, which was written after witnessing the performative action that followed a wave of support for the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s murder. The electric ‘Came Here From The Loot’, meanwhile, has morphed from being about US politics to a general statement on “living in a fucked up time”. “It’s a middle finger to the system,” Vandal says. “I want people to feel powerful and like they’re able to speak up.”
After some of the experiences that nearly caused Vandal to quit music altogether, it’s no surprise that she sees ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’ as “rebellious”. “It’s not what people told me to do, and we definitely weren’t following a formula,” she says with a smirk. “It’s against the grain, but that’s just what I’m like as a person.”
Ecca Vandal’s ‘Looking For People To Unfollow’ is out now via Loma Vista Recordings.
Listen to Ecca Vandal’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Ali Shutler
Photography: Brianna Alysse
Photography assistance: GarrettsArchive
Makeup: Nimai
Styling: Evy Céleste Anna Cornelie
Label: Loma Vista Recordings