Ecca Vandal went offline, rejected industry formulas, and came back with ‘Looking For People To Unfollow,’ her ferocious second album out May 22, 2026
Nine years is a long time to wait for a second album. But for Ecca Vandal, the South African-born, Melbourne-based artist who exploded onto the heavy music scene in 2017 with a swaggering debut full of rock-rap collisions and guest turns from Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén, Letlive’s Jason Aalon Butler, and Sampa The Great, the silence was never stagnation. It was strategy. On May 22, 2026, she returned with Looking For People To Unfollow, a 17-track opus released via Loma Vista Recordings and recorded almost entirely with co-writer and producer Richie “Kidnot” Buxton in his childhood bedroom in bayside Melbourne.
The album is a genre-fluid, uncompromising statement that has already earned her a debut at Coachella, a scorching first appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and this week’s cover of NME. The road to this moment was not without its detours. After the debut’s momentum built into support slots with Queens of the Stone Age across Australia and festival appearances at Download and Reading and Leeds, people started queuing up to give Vandal unsolicited direction. Stick to one genre, they said. Pay $50,000 for a high-profile producer.
Lean into the crossover hype. Instead, she and Buxton traveled to Los Angeles for a run of pop writing sessions that left her cold. The sessions followed a formula: play a few familiar tracks to emulate, write fast, wrap up, move on. “I wanted to tune out all the noise,” Vandal has said. So she did. She went completely offline, deliberately and intentionally, and stayed there until she was ready to make music on her own terms.
‘Bleed But Never Die’ and the Long Way Back
The first signal that she had returned with something worth hearing came in 2024 with “Bleed But Never Die,” a track she describes as written at a time when she was trying to understand her own femininity. “It just felt right as the first song back,” she said. The response confirmed that her audience had not only waited, it had grown. Six months later, “Cruising To Self Soothe,” a paint-peeling, bass-heavy anthem about cultivating inner strength while moving through isolation, arrived and shifted everything again.
The track, which has since clocked 1.8 million YouTube views, caught the attention of the Deftones, who brought Vandal on as a support act. When a clip of her performing went viral, comparisons started flying: Joan Jett, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani, Zach de la Rocha. She was already past all of them.
Looking For People To Unfollow earns every one of those references without settling for any. The album opens with the lounge-textured calm of “Airplane Mode” before “Eyes Shut” tears through institutional hypocrisy with full-throttle fury. “Sorry! Crash!” lands like At the Drive-In at peak Relationship of Command. “Bleed But Never Die” locks into a stuttering, repetitive hook that lodges itself immediately, while “Levitate Part 1 + 2” pivots into synth-led R&B, and “Did A Little More To Forget” finds Vandal over jazzy piano and saturated drums. Nothing stays still long enough to be categorized, and that is exactly the point.
The Jimmy Kimmel Moment and What Comes Next
On May 20, two days before the album dropped, Vandal walked onto the Jimmy Kimmel Live stage for her US television debut and played “Cruising To Self Soothe” with her band, featuring drummer Dan Maio and Buxton on guitar. She screamed, she twisted, she put a foot on the speaker risers. Actor Jason Momoa responded to the performance on Instagram with a string of fire emojis. It was the kind of debut that makes everything that came before it feel like prologue.
Born to Sri Lankan Tamil refugee parents and raised across South Africa and Melbourne, Vandal has built her identity across every boundary the music industry instinctively tries to enforce. The willingness to go fully offline, to reject the $50,000 producer and the LA writing session formula, to make the whole record in a bedroom, is not romanticized self-reliance. It is the direct cause of why the album sounds the way it does. Vandal has now landed Coachella, a Deftones support run, and an NME cover. The UK and European summer festival circuit is next. None of it arrived quickly. All of it was earned.
