<p style="text-align: center;">For Ecca Vandal, punk was a way in – and a way out. </p><p style="text-align: center;">Born to a Sri Lankan family in South Africa, she moved to Australia at a young age, and faced pressure to assimilate. <em>“There were just so many restrictions and limitations growing up in such a strict cultural and religious upbringing,” </em>says Ecca. <em> “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.”</em></p><p style="text-align: center;">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. <em>“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.” </em>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 <em>“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.”</em></p><p style="text-align: center;">While punk is the framework of Ecca Vandal’s <em>LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW</em>, it equally bears the marks of her girlhood spent traversing between different cultures: <em>“The music that I was absorbing and listening to as a child was soul, gospel,