Nation

The duo Nation—vocalist Fresh Jame (Frank) and producer Funball (Will)— met while modeling in London and formed the project in 2018. Frank, a rapper, and Will, a painter with a background in audio engineering, began making music through loose, marathon sessions spent tripping on mushrooms, key-smashing drum machines, and pulling from a chaotic mix of Rage Against the Machine, rap-rock, video game soundtracks, and all manner of “dinky shit.” The two stumbled into music without any lofty goals, but their euphoric dance-pop, spitfire punk ethos, and refreshingly raw spirit quickly made them secret favorites of the underground. In 2021, a chance encounter with Yves Tumor at a downtown Los Angeles rave sparked a friendship rooted in a shared respect for DIY culture and experimental art. That connection eventually brought them into Yves’ studio, where Nation entered a wider creative orbit— meeting, befriending, and collaborating with artists pushing at the edges of music, performance, and underground culture. While some might place Nation alongside contemporary electroclash duos, they feel far more self-possessed than referential. They have little interest in nostalgia fetishism; instead, there’s an almost camp quality to their unpretentiousness, as they hold the absurdity of modern society back up to itself. Nation dreams of playing in unconventional spaces, staging shows with an amusement park’s worth of chaos and gathering an eclectic cross-section of people rather than one fixed scene: “A construction worker next to some crazy Kandi woman next to some shirtless hairless man, all getting down to the same beat.”