‘I’ve had label people tell me to pick a lane’: Ecca Vandal on the industry advice she had to ignore

One of the most profound moments of Ecca Vandal’s life happened while her manager was checking his emails. In a break between meetings in a Los Angeles cafe, he waved Vandal outside for some fresh air while he caught up on work.

Vandal shrugged and walked outside, intending to do a few laps of the block. But as soon as she turned the corner, she stopped dead. Walking towards her was Chino Moreno, the famed frontman of alt-metal band Deftones. “Oh, hey Ecca,” he told the starstruck Melbourne artist, “I really like your music.”

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, Chino, I’m such a big fan’,” Vandal recounts with a huge grin on her face, sitting in a Newtown cafe on a grim and rainy day in Sydney. The two chatted for a few minutes, Chino telling Vandal that he’d found her music online a few months earlier. He asked her how her recent tour with Limp Bizkit was. “Then he was like, ‘Cool, good luck with everything.’ He walked away, and I nearly melted on the pavement.”

Three weeks after the chance encounter, Deftones booked Ecca Vandal on their Dia de los Deftones festival. “If I hadn’t [walked out of the cafe] at that exact time, I would have missed him,” Vandal says.

Clearly Moreno is a big fan because just a few months later he selected Vandal to support the band on their mammoth Australia and New Zealand tour. It’s why Vandal is back in the country for a brief second, after packing up her home in Melbourne in early 2025 to “float” around the world. “We’re living out of two suitcases right now,” she says, sighing. “A couple of clothes hangers would be nice.”

Vandal, born in South Africa with Sri-Lankan Tamil heritage, grew up in Melbourne’s Doncaster East, throwing fake club nights in her sisters’ bedrooms playing ’90s hip-hop, soul and R&B. She became increasingly drawn to jazz, enamoured of the genre’s freewheeling experimentation, and wound up studying it formally at the Victorian College of the Arts.

But she was also obsessed with punk and hardcore, listening to Fugazi, Deftones and experimental California outfit Mr. Bungle. Her debut EP, 2016’s well-received End of Time, was a brash punk expedition with a spiritual jazz heart – gleefully throwing styles and genres in the Vandal blender. Why stay in one lane, Vandal’s music declared, when I can swerve over the whole road?

Her debut self-titled album arrived in 2017 to more positive reviews, and it seemed that Vandal was cresting a wave about to break. She and her band were planning a move to London in 2020. Then the pandemic hit, and she fell off the face of the earth.

‘The [local music] industry is a bit suffocating because Australia looks to other places for direction [about] what is good.’

Ecca Vandal

“I went offline for four years completely,” Vandal says. “I didn’t post a single thing. I was hardly online. I was hardly looking at what was going on other than skateboarding videos … how to dye your hair at home. I needed to figure out what I wanted to say, and I needed silence for that, and that’s exactly what happened.”

Vandal also wanted space from the local industry, which she found stifling. “The Australian industry is really interesting,” she says. “I found it a little bit suffocating because I think Australia looks to other places for direction [about] what is good. We had a little bit of attention overseas, but at the time we were still building. So I didn’t think Australia knew whether they could fully back me, you know what I mean?

“So I just was like, ‘I don’t want to be a part of something where I don’t feel like I can clearly be myself’. I went independent and this entire process has been independent; we’ve created this album on the smell of an oily rag … I feel like I just needed to detach from it just to actually find what I wanted to say.

“I’ve actually had label people tell me to pick a lane, and if I picked a lane I’d be very successful, and so that was the advice I had to ignore. When I got told that, I was like, ‘OK, you’re not the people that I’m going to be listening to.’”

Like many artists during those few years, Vandal figured that she might not continue with her music career. Until one day when her partner Richie Buxton (musician and producer Kid Not) played her a beat he was working on. Slowly, surely, with no one in the world checking in on them, the two started to piece together what would become her long-awaited second album, Looking for People to Unfollow.

They set up a studio in a small garage in the back of Buxton’s parents’ house in an outer Melbourne suburb, after causing a bit of friction with their neighbours while recording in their own place. “I was tracking some of the heavy, heavier vocals and people are working from home on Zoom calls and we’re getting knocks on the front door going, ‘Can you please turn it down? What is going on in here? We need to work’. And I’m like, ‘OK, fair enough. It’s pretty loud’,” Vandal says with a laugh.

Their garage studio didn’t have internet, amplifying the feeling of Vandal and Buxton being in their own little world, chipping away at an album that no one really knew they were making. “It was pretty much our world for three years … It was a special, special time in my life,” Vandal says. “I had the most fun I’ve ever had creating that album because we were in this little universe that felt entirely ours.”

All things considered, it makes complete sense that Looking for People to Unfollow arrives like a polar blast of refreshing air. True to her ethos of never staying in one lane, you’ll find hip-hop beats colliding with punk guitars and throat-tearing vocals one moment, before beautiful jazz piano and skittish trap beats come through in the next. It speaks volumes of Vandal and Buxton’s skill as songwriters and arrangers that the album doesn’t feel like a disjointed, Frankensteinian monster – rather, its 17 tracks connect and flow.

After spending four years completely offline, Vandal had to jump back on the promo tools when it came time to reconnect with fans. Eschewing the usual tactic of just switching up her profile pictures, she posted a few snippets of the band rehearsing album track Dance in Debt. To her and Buxton’s surprise, the videos began blowing up online.

Chino Moreno is far from the only big name to have jumped on the Ecca Vandal train: Blink-182’s Travis Barker, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Garbage’s Shirley Manson and even skater icon Tony Hawk are all confirmed fans. Her recent Coachella set was packed to the rafters, and she’s staring down the barrel of a hectic touring schedule over the next year. Vandal couldn’t be happier.

“[My account] went from like 11,000 followers to 50,000 followers in six weeks or something,” Vandal says. “I was seeing that, ‘oh OK, people are drawn to this for something beyond me’. It wasn’t like a label told them to follow … No one else told them to come here. They somehow found it and decided to be here, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for this project.”

Ecca Vandal’s Looking for People to Unfollow is out now.