It’s Ecca Vandal’s turn, time to pay attention.
Born in South Africa of Sri Lankan heritage, the genre-bending independent artist is now very much at home in Melbourne, Australia. American audiences got a closer look when Vandal made her debut at Coachella. Here’s a talent who effortlessly fuses rock with hip-hop, punk, jazz, electronic and pretty much anything she wants, a performer with more raw energy than an arena on grand final day.
On Wednesday night, May 20, another debut as Vandal made her first appearance on U.S. TV with a powerful performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Sporting blue-toned hair and leading a tight backing tandem of electric guitar and drums, Vandal ripped through “Cruising to Self Soothe,” lifted from her forthcoming studio album LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, due out Friday, May 22 via Loma Vista Recordings.
The collection was recorded and produced by Richie Buxton and Vandal in Buxton’s childhood bedroom in bayside Melbourne. “We cut out everything that didn’t serve us, the timelines, the metrics, the pressure to ‘stay visible’ online. We tuned out of the feed and turned inwards,” she has said of the project.
In Richie’s room, they built a tiny home studio. “Four walls that became a universe,” she recounts. “The Internet was painfully slow, so we were truly disconnected from the online game.”
Far away from their inner-city friends, and distractions, that little room “became our whole world for nearly two years. It held all our chaos and all our clarity, a little ‘playpen’ where we could live, play and experiment like teenagers again. We started making things with our hands again, tangible, imperfect, and real,” Vandal enthuses. “We wanted to celebrate long-form, the idea of an album as a whole body of work, while the world was chasing 15-second snippets and algorithm friendly noise.”
The Ecca Vandal experience has been lived on stage, with spots at Camp Flog Gnaw and support slots with the likes of Limp Bizkit, Queens of the Stone Age, IDLES, The Prodigy, and, most recently, Deftones. The 2026 U.K. and Continental Europe summer festival circuit beckons.
Check out dates below and watch Ecca Vandal’s performance on Kimmel.
Ecca Vandal’s 2026 U.K. and Europe tour dates
June 3 — Impact Festival at Tauron Arena, Krakow, PL
June 5 — Rock im Park Festival, Nürnberg, DE
June 6 — Rock am Ring Festival, Nurburgring, DE
June 10 — Rock For People, Hradec Kralove, CZ
June 15 — Release Festival, Athens, GR
June 19 — Pinkpop Festival, Landgraaf, NE
June 20 — Southside Festival, Neuhausen ob Eck, DE
June 21 — Hurricane Festival, Scheeßel, DE
June 23 — Sparkassen Park, Mönchengladbach, DE^
June 28 — Outbreak Festival, Manchester, UK
July 2 — Roskilde Festival, Roskilde, DK
July 4 — Rock Werchter Festival, Werchter BE
July 5 — Les Eurockeennes, Belforte, FR
Aug. 18 — Parkbuhne Wuhlheide, Berlin, DE
Aug. 20 — Open Air Gampel, Gampel, CH
Aug. 23 — All Points East x Outbreak Fest, London, UK
Aug. 25 — IMMA, Dublin, IE
Aug. 27 — Edinburgh Summer Sessions, Edinburgh, UK
