ECCA VANDAL
LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW
Record Of The Month
Ecca Vandal’s LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW is your reminder to stop letting the feed choose for you. Bold, unpredictable and impossible to squeeze into one neat little box, this is a record made for following your ears instead. Want it in your collection? Hit the button below now.
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The Artist
Ecca Vandal has never been particularly interested in staying where she’s put.
Born in South Africa to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and raised in Melbourne, she grew up around a collision of sounds before studying jazz at the Victorian College of the Arts and eventually falling hard for punk and hardcore. That combination of musical training, curiosity and refusal to pick a lane became the foundation of everything that followed.
Her early singles announced an artist with serious voltage, and her self-titled 2017 debut pushed rock, punk, hip-hop, electronics and pop into the same room without asking permission. Collaborations with Sampa The Great, Dennis Lyxzén of Refused and Jason Aalon Butler only reinforced the point: Ecca Vandal was never going to make music that behaved neatly.
Then, after building considerable momentum, she stepped away. What followed was less a disappearance than a recalibration. Away from the pressure to constantly post, perform and remain visible, Vandal began stripping away the outside noise and reconnecting with the reason she made music in the first place. Nine years after her debut, she returned sounding not reinvented, but more completely herself.
The Record
LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW is only Ecca Vandal’s second album, arriving nine years after her self-titled debut.
Much of it was created with longtime collaborator Richie Buxton during a period of deliberate disconnection. Working from a tiny studio built in Buxton’s childhood bedroom, the pair spent months largely removed from timelines, metrics and outside opinion, following ideas simply because they felt exciting.
That freedom is all over the record.
Punk remains the heartbeat, but hardcore, hip-hop, electronics, pop, bhangra and more are allowed to collide around it. Rather than sounding scattered, the album feels liberated. Seventeen songs built on instinct, first impulses and the joy of making something without worrying about where it might eventually sit.
The title gets right to the heart of it. The “unfollowing” isn’t just digital. It’s about cutting loose from expectations, metrics, genre boundaries and the endless pressure to present yourself for an audience. Vandal has described the process as removing everything that didn’t serve them and turning inward instead.
The result is loud, melodic, vulnerable, funny, abrasive and gloriously difficult to categorise.
She didn’t disappear and come back sounding more calculated.
She disappeared, unfollowed the noise, and came back sounding more like herself.
This isn’t a record that asks to fit neatly into your taste.
It asks you to expand it.
Why We Chose It
Because this is exactly what a Record of the Month should do.
LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW is not the safe pick, the obvious pick or the record an algorithm would necessarily serve up next. It’s restless, genre-blurring and full of left turns, the kind of album that asks something of you and gives plenty back.
That matters to us.
Waxx Lyrical has always been about human curation, curiosity and putting records in your hands that might take you somewhere unexpected. Ecca Vandal has made a record built on that same instinct: less noise, fewer outside voices, more trust in where the music wants to go.
It surprised us.
It dazzled us.
We hope it does the same to you.
If You Like…
Santigold
Nova Twins
M.I.A.
Yves Tumor
Amyl and the Sniffers
Fever 333
Rico Nasty
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
But the real appeal is that Ecca Vandal doesn’t sit neatly beside any of them. That’s the point.
Pressing Details
Label: Loma Vista
Catalog: LVR05651
Edition: Blue Icing Aus Exclusive
Extras: Exclusive listening notes
Full tracklist across two sides
