NATION — Fresh Jame and Funball — are careful to not divulge too much about themselves online. Provide too much context and “things lose their special little twinkle”, Jame says. Perhaps for this reason, he asks me not to reveal what city our interview takes place in. When I arrive, they’ve just finished their photo shoot in a hotel bathroom. Jame, the vocalist, is dripping wet, having climbed into the shower with his clothes on. The producer, Funball, opted out. As they exit the bathroom, Funball shoots me a smile and an enthusiastic “Fudge yeah!”. It’s a term few have uttered since the early 2010s, and one that tells you all you need to know about the electronic duo’s chill vibes and uncanny ability to stir up memories deep within a generation of young listeners.
Their friendship also began without much context. Five years ago, Funball was living with a family friend in the suburbs of London. “I spent a lot of time just listening to music and walking around, pretty much by myself,” he says. “I went to a lot of raves and stuff, but the friends I had in London weren’t really into the same thing.” Despite being a somewhat isolating experience, it was also transformative — it’s where he met Jame, running into him on the street one day, somewhere in Hackney. “I was really excited when I met him,” Funball says, “because it was like, damn, finally another American who likes to get down and not give a fuck!”
Funball was working mainly in visual art at the time and directed a music video for Jame, who had a project called Fresh Jame. Though Funball had previously tried his hand at making music, using DAWs and drum machines, things never really clicked. Together though, the pair began making music under the moniker T.S.D. and the project soon evolved into NATION, which built up a core fanbase of niche SoundCloud listeners and an impressive list of established musicians. They released their 11-track eponymous album in 2020, a project that would circulate with ever-growing underground popularity, before being re-released with cult Swedish label Year0001 earlier this year. Since then, their stock has only grown, with them appearing on Year0001’s RIFT Two compilation album, on tracks with Palmistry, Bladee and Varg2™, and tours with Yung Lean and, now, Yves Tumor.
Currently based in California, the duo’s sound is serpentine and dynamic. While they certainly don’t shy away from acting on creative impulse, they do it with a dedication to their craft that allows them to skirt potential accusations of distractedness or artificiality. For a duo interested in being real — and whose influences encompass EDM and EBM acts like Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and Front 242, Detroit techno legends like DJ Stingray, early hip-hop and even late 00s Jerk — the path to expression is not through catering to trends, nor through carefully planned performativity, but through immediate action. Lil B, whose approach to music videos Funball describes as “going outside with a camera, filming for like 20 minutes, just editing it and dropping it immediately,” is a clear role model of theirs.
Such a process risks coming across meme-y in an era when all expression is filtered through internet social codes. “It’s very meme-able to be just like, a real person these days,” Jame says. That said, their music often critiques the quick fixes offered by social media and aspirations of virality. In “Ça Va,” a track with Ecco2k released this summer, Jame sings: “You don’t even realise what you’re doin’ and it’s done / This whole generation runs away from what could end it all.” The song is an accelerationist warning of the abyss that lies on the other side of our vain digital presence. The Gen Z-Millennial cusps admit, though, that they would probably be “terrible” had they been born even just a few years later. “I would be out here wearing big red boots, tiny Amiri jeans, and freaking… who knows what else?” Jame says.
In other songs, the stakes are less generationally specific. In “S.H.A” and “Up & Down”, two singles from earlier this year, NATION turn their attention to love. In the former, atop eccentric dance-inducing percussion and synths equally reminiscent of new wave and no wave, Jame sings: “Even though it feels good, it still hurts a lot (Take me, take me) / I love to do it, I can’t do a lot (Take me, take me).” In “Up & Down,” a mellow track rife with deconstructed instrumentation and electric guitar riffs, he contemplates how, ultimately, “Our love is all we have”. Elsewhere, NATION opts for vibe over lyrical explication. Their music can be somewhat alien, shedding language and genre and shapeshifting into whatever sound best fits the mood. “Language is kind of being hollowed out. Like words don’t really, totally mean much but I feel like it’s just a natural progression of language right now,” Funball says, laughing. “It’s also a little concerning.”
It may be surprising that the duo whose lyrical provocations include “Can you please cancel me?” on “Soldier Vision”, are equally inspired by being offline. Funball cites “hearing organic sounds” as a major source of motivation, to which Jame adds “and looking at little tiny worlds of bugs and things walking around”. On a roll, they continue to wax poetic about nature, with Funball adding, “Looking at things from far away! Horizon lines! Scale! That’s really inspiring.”
I had a taste of the chaos and excitement of a NATION live show the night prior, during their opening set on Yves Tumor’s tour, which comes to the UK this week. They appeared on stage wearing outfits emblematic of a vocalist-producer duo. Jame’s look was loud: sweatpants, turquoise leather loafers, a denim jacket, a self-cropped white tank top, an ombre ski beanie, bamboo hoop earrings and a long strip of hair falling out of his hat. Behind the drum machine, Funball was dressed in less flashy, but still related garb: baggy jeans, sneakers, a hoodie and a bright white puffer vest with the insignia “Bulldogs”. Their style is random but fresh, precisely because of just how random it is. “Sometimes you’ll just see somebody on the street and it’s like so touching,” Jame says when asked of their style inspirations.
Almost immediately, Jame began accompanying his cooled vocals with erratic dancing. He was in the moment, rather than repeating some oft practiced choreography — although he admits one of his favourite moves is “jumping over his own leg.” While he may have grown up in a Southern California high school “literally jerk dancing with like tiny backpacks on,” his moves now are somewhere at the nexus of Thom Yorke, contemporary avant-garde and hip-hop. It’s his attempt at “trying to exhibit the rawest expression we can so that it’s hopefully understandable.” At one point he propped his leg akimbo on the speaker monitor, twisting his body into an awkward position that he held for the duration of a song. Though Jame gave audiences a finale during the last song, twirling and bowing at the same time, removing his hat before skipping fast as he could across the stage, yelping “thank you” in a cartoonish blip before returning backstage.
When I ask NATION about future projects, they respond with “too much.” After early periods where they would “just do mushrooms and play drum machines for 15 hours”, making music while housesitting for friends, the duo has amassed a vast catalog of unreleased beats, solo tracks and collaborations that span everything from industrial to techno. Their next project could be ambient — or it could be a two-hour mixtape. What they’re calling “evil NATION” is also on the way, a sound that Jame says has just “been pulling up lately” within their music. It might take a while for it to be released, especially because NATION are self-described “control freaks”, but we look forward to the day.
“We need a bunch of unpaid interns,” Jame quips, to which Funball offers an even better plan: “We need to just go pick up a bunch of interns from some random art college.” If you happen to be an art student reading this, well, you know where to find them.
Credits
Photography Julien Tell