When Drain Gang member Ecco2k first met the boys behind the mysterious musical duo Nation, they weren’t quite what he expected. “You looked really crazy, but you’re some of the most sane people that I know,” he joked to Funball and Frank Jame (Will Wadhams and Frank Nadolny) when they reunited a few weeks ago. Nation’s seemingly crazy vibe was born in 2019 during studio jam sessions inspired by their highly eclectic musical diet, and the project took them from Palmdale, California to London and, eventually, to New York. The result, a year after, was their debut self-titled album, followed by collabs with Ecco2k, Bladee and Varg2™, plus tours with Yung Lean and Yves Tumor. But despite their inspirations and associations, Nation’s sound is entirely their own, something Funball says comes from abstracting and filtering the world through their own mental matrix—a “mosaic approach,” Jame calls it. Their new album Nation 2, out this week alongside its lead single, “Take Your Peace,” is no exception, but a little more grown-up, they told Ecco2k when they caught up on chaos logic, choreography, and crackhead stuff.
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ECCO2K: How are you?
FUNBALL: Good, man. What you up to?
ECCO2K: Just recording. I just came back from a pretty long trip visiting factories, so it’s nice to be in London and sit at the computer more. What about you?
FRESH JAME: I’ve been cobbling and making music and working on videos and stuff.
ECCO2K: Man, I miss hanging out with you guys. It’s been such a long time, for real. I haven’t seen you since you moved to New York.
FUNBALL: We’re a little different. [Laughs]
ECCO2K: How has it changed you?
FUNBALL: I don’t know, we just got normal jobs and stuff. We’re big boys.
JAME: We’re growing up and it’s painful.
ECCO2K: Really? Has it changed your music at all?
FUNBALL: I guess the time when we’re in the studio just feels more scarce, so we’re just more intentional.
ECCO2K: I feel like you’ve always been very intentional with the stuff that you make though.
FUNBALL: Yeah, we try. Before, it would be like throwing darts at a wall, just constantly experimenting. I like coming at music from a totally abstract place and then just letting whatever happens happen.
ECCO2K: I think what’s cool about the stuff that you make is that the style might seem kind of messy or hard to read, but the choices that you make are still very deliberate. And then it became a lot cooler to me once I actually got to know the two of you better, because you’re such calm and centered people, which is another funny thing about you. I get this all the time too, you meet someone and they’re like, “You know what? You’re actually not at all like I imagined.” [Laughs] And now I’m that person with you. I remember seeing your stuff before actually meeting you and having a certain impression of what you two were like. And then once we started hanging out, it’s like, “Wow, you looked really crazy, but you’re some of the most sane people that I know.”
JAME: [Laughs] I think you’re one of the most sane people we know, too.
FUNBALL: Same, gang.
ECCO2K: And the work you make, by extension, feels even more interesting because it’s obviously not coming out like this by accident. It’s similar to what makes nature and the universe so beautiful. Even though aspects of it might seem chaotic, it’s all kind of governed by a certain internal logic that may or may not be fully understood by people.
FUNBALL: There’s some underlying structure going on.
ECCO2K: And that’s what chaos really is anyway. It’s not the absence of structure, it’s just infinite complexity. That’s kind of how your stuff feels to me. You’re so deliberate, but the style is still so chaotic.
FUNBALL: We both just listen to such a variety of music and we absorb everything and hop in the studio and something comes out.
JAME: I don’t even know what my vocal style is.
ECCO2K: Your vocal style is really distinct. On a lot of the new tracks in this new project, the vocals are a lot more in focus than they have been in the past.
JAME: Yeah, I feel like I finally decided to actually say real words or something.
FUNBALL: Lock in on some real words. [Laughs]
JAME: On the first Nation project and a lot of the first songs, I thought I was saying something. And then if I listen to that now, it’s probably 90% gibberish.
ECCO2K: [Laughs] Really?
JAME: Just trial and error really. But I guess I honed into more of a storytelling thing.
ECCO2K: Lyrics are really important, and such a fun and challenging way to express yourself.
JAME: Absolutely. Sometimes months will go by and you’ll realize that thing that you talked about in the song is some weird deep thing within yourself that you had to realize or come to terms with. You’re really writing about something that is inside of you. It’s weird. It’s very subconscious and therapeutic.
ECCO2K: I can totally relate to that. I feel like we agree that if we could express these things in a more effective way, intellectually or verbally, then we would be, I don’t know, doing a TED Talk or something. [Laughs] Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot while making this project? Because it’s been quite a long time that you’ve been working on it, and a lot has changed, right?
FUNBALL: Yeah. If I look at the Ableton file of each track, one will have five tracks, and an older one might have 100. That’s from a different period where I was just trying things out more, but now I know what I want pretty immediately. It’s cool because the project has tracks from two years ago, and there’s a couple tracks that are only a few months old too.
ECCO2K: That’s one of the big luxuries of being able to work on a project for such a long period of time, because you get to contribute to an idea from several different perspectives. Is this the longest time you’ve ever spent working on one thing?
JAME: Yeah, definitely.
FUNBALL: I don’t think I ever want to spend this long on a specific project again, honestly, but we just haven’t released much. We have our first album, which we made when we were babies in the game. That’s it.
ECCO2K: We’re both in kind of similar positions in that way, right? It’s just about not compromising on the work. We have a similar sense of what’s actually important, rather than letting the expectations of people dictate our creative decision making.
JAME: I can’t imagine what it’s like to constantly put stuff out that you’re not entirely proud of.
ECCO2K: I feel like it must be kind of like getting tattoos. You just have to not really give a shit. If you’re going to be precious about it or sensitive about it, then it’s maybe not for you. Certain people have a different attitude where they release pretty much anything and the audience can make their own decisions on what they want to pick out of that.
FUNBALL: And I do really appreciate those artists.
JAME: There are a lot of amazing artists that do that.
ECCO2K: Definitely. So you’ve been shooting a lot of videos too over the past few years?
JAME: Yeah, recently we’ve been getting the videos together.
FUNBALL: We’re going to have some people help edit. But honestly, Frank can edit. We’ve been kind of doing everything ourselves.
JAME: Anytime we try to get somebody else to do it, it’s either they want money that we don’t have or we’re not entirely into what they’re into.
ECCO2K: It is really difficult to acclimatize somebody to the style that you’ve developed with your friends over such a long time and plug an outsider in. There are some growing pains if you want to scale up beyond what you can accomplish with your own two hands. But I think it’s cool that a lot of your stuff has been very DIY, and it’s definitely possible to keep a DIY kind of method on a larger scale. It’s just challenging to get it the way that you want.
FUNBALL: Yeah.
ECCO2K: But a lot of your early videos are extremely good. They’re so, so distinct and they have a lot of personality. You are such distinct characters and it really comes out in the stuff that you make.
JAME: Thank you.
FUNBALL: Hell yeah. We didn’t want to wash it down, but we still wanted to present it in a new format that’s more…
JAME: Clear.
ECCO2K: Yeah, it’s very true to who you are, but more polished. I remember looking at your older videos and music and there’s a really diverse range of influences that I can pick out, but also so much more that I’m not aware of. Whenever we listen to music together, you always end up showing me stuff that I’m completely unfamiliar with. It’s really satisfying to see somebody able to take in a lot of diverse inspiration and filter it through themselves and spit something out that is pretty much unrecognizable. A lot of people struggle to find their own voice or to find a way to separate themselves from their inspiration. It’s cool that you guys managed to do that so early.
JAME: Nice, man.
FUNBALL: We’re constantly inspired by new things. We’re absorbing little bits and pieces small enough to digest everything, not just seeing a whole artist and coming up with something that’s inspired by that. We’ve been chewing on little pieces for years, and because we’ve consumed music in that way, it’s been easier to abstract everything and filter it.
JAME: It’s a feeling of just straight-up realness that comes from many different things.
FUNBALL: I feel like we were all exposed to Gorillaz very early. Gorillaz is probably one of the biggest keystone influences. And there’s no genre at all to that. It’s not even attached to a human. It’s so meta. I hate using that word, but yeah.
ECCO2K: It’s such an important project for me as well. One of the most important things that I picked up from them as a kid was that the context that you create around the music is as big a part of the artistic expression as the music itself. I don’t know. I have this really strong memory of watching you, Will, in this green room full of people who are doing crackhead stuff, and you’re sitting at this piano in the corner flawlessly playing this really beautiful classical composition. That situation feels so symbolic of you, because you’re in the middle of this hedonistic, crazy context and you’re expressing something really pure in the middle of this situation that’s a bit gross.
JAME: [Laughs] That’s fire.
FUNBALL: Yeah. I feel like we can all relate to that, whether it’s being in a chaotic situation or being in a very sterile situation and feeling the opposite.
ECCO2K: I feel like a lot of your aesthetic sensibilities are quite influenced by rave culture, but minus the hedonism, basically.
FUNBALL: Yeah. The grime, the disgusting consumption.
ECCO2K: The divine.
JAME: Or whatever.
FUNBALL: Whenever anyone asks us what our music is like, I immediately go to The Prodigy, because it’s just got a crazy variety to it, and it’s kind of intense. I really like how they took rave culture and made it rock music and all these other things.
JAME: It’s all about the stage.
FUNBALL: Yeah, just a very crazy stage presence. The variety of samples they used is ridiculous, from samples from news TV to Nirvana to samurai sword sounds. It’s like object art to me.
ECCO2K: It’s a collage approach, which is a sick way to make stuff if the chunks are small enough.
JAME: [Laughs] Right. It’s more of a mosaic.
ECCO2K: Has your collaboration process changed, or is it pretty much the same back and forth that you’ve always had? I feel like a lot of people seem to be confused over the fact that you are basically a band and that Nation is not Frank.
JAME: Yeah, everyone thinks my name is Nation. My name is Frank. [Laughs]
ECCO2K: Nation is the name of the band, but you both produce. You definitely don’t have the traditional producer-vocalist relationship.
JAME: Well, since we’ve been living together, Will is in his room producing a lot and then he’ll send me stuff, and I just hop on it.
FUNBALL: Yeah, but I want it to go back to being in the studio going back and forth.
JAME: I think once we open ourselves up to finding what the next thing is, it’ll go back to jamming it out again.
ECCO2K: That’s kind of where you were when I first met you. It was very jammy. And nothing you make is ever a waste. The objective is not always to produce something to be consumed.
FUNBALL: Yeah. It’s always been process-first. The whole reason we do this shit is because when we just started jamming together, it was the best feeling ever. Now that we’re more focused on making finished things, it’s taking a while. We have hundreds of demos because we just like the process that much.
ECCO2K: It must’ve been crazy narrowing it down to under 13 tracks. Everything that I’ve heard has been really good.
FUNBALL: We’ve released demos as a mix, and I think we’re probably going to do that again. We’re just going to take 100 demos and DJ it and release that, just to shed it all. Like a snake shed. And we maybe have five projects coming out this year, type shit.
ECCO2K: Do you miss performing live? You’re such good live performers.
JAME: Yeah, I want to do that really bad. I have so much fun doing that. Dancing is fun.
FUNBALL: We’re going to have that choreography soon too. [Laughs]
JAME: Even at the shows where we were opening up for Shanti [Yves Tumor] or something and nobody’s reacting, we still have so much fun doing that.
ECCO2K: But obviously you belong in front of a crowd of people who are going to dance with you.
JAME: We like to see them dance. I haven’t really been in a place where I’ve seen more than four or five people actually dancing in a while.
FUNBALL: Just anywhere?
JAME: Yeah. Any type of party where it’s actually some dancing. I really want to go dance.
ECCO2K: I mean, now that you mentioned it, same. That’s crazy.
FUNBALL: We gotta bring dancing back.
JAME: What’s up with that?
ECCO2K: I don’t know. People are stiff. Maybe the music just isn’t hitting. I think for me, that’s usually the problem.
JAME: Yeah. Most of the time you go out to something and it’s just like, [fist pumps].
ECCO2K: Exactly. The only measure of whether the music is cracking or not can’t be whether everybody is jumping up and down. That’s not the only kind of movement. It’s kind of rare that you hear music out that actually makes you want to dance, dance. That’s the problem. People just want that reaction that looks good on camera when the people closest to the DJ booth are jumping up and down with their shirts off and their phones up.
JAME: Yeah.
ECCO2K: We’ve got to go to South America. It’s the only continent I haven’t visited yet.
FUNBALL: I really want to go down there. I’ve never been.
JAME: Let’s do it.
ECCO2K: We should go. I feel like another thing worth highlighting about you is that you’re always messing with your appearance a lot. You’re both traditionally very good-looking guys, but you choose to present yourself in this really sideways type of way.
FUNBALL: [Laughs] For real.
ECCO2K: Which I also really respect, because it’s like, “I can play piano really well, but I make really fucked up music. And I’m really hot, but I make myself look really weird.” It’s just even more of a flex to actually be like, “I decide to do this because I can.”
FUNBALL: Oh, yeah. If there’s anything I want to inspire people to do, it’s to give themselves permission to do whatever they want to do. We were talking the other day about different eras in the past few years and were like, “Oh, that was the time when Frank had this hair.”
JAME: [Laughs] Yeah. We use my hair as the timestamp.
ECCO2K: There’s a lot of timestamps then.
JAME: I’m trying to go for long hair right now.
ECCO2K: Oh, you’re going to grow it out?
JAME: Yeah. I want to have woman hair. I want to get a bob or something.
ECCO2K: That would be crazy.
JAME: I want to have lady hair. [Laughs]
ECCO2K: You think you’ll be able to follow through, or will you get bored and cut it off?
JAME: That’s usually what happens, so we’ll see. I’ve tried mad times. That’s one of the things I always do.
ECCO2K: That’s just the process, right?
JAME: Yeah, exactly. Keep the streets waiting.
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