I caught up with Rory Day and Sean Nudl to talk songwriting, causing controversy in corsets, and Nation Wild’s next single.
Rory Day first met Sean Nudl at a teenage party in their hometown of Bendigo. Day had been playing drums for some years—being the kind of child who would drive his parents to distraction by drumming on every available surface—while Nudl had been in and out of bands since primary school. By his own admission, Day had done his research on Nudl and knew they were both listening to Melbourne group The Delta Riggs. That one shared taste led to a conversation, which led to jam sessions, which led eventually to the formation of their current rock group Nation Wild.
“I don’t know where Rory got that from. I don’t reckon I ever met Rory at a party.”
I interviewed Sean and Rory from the loungeroom that they share in Melbourne. Or rather, they were there, and I was in Sydney on a video call beset with technical difficulties. Rory laughs as Sean contests his recollection, which has things going very differently: “We had a jam session, and someone brought Rory along because he was this awesome drummer. From when I met him, to about one and a half to two years after, I never had a conversation with Rory. I didn’t know what he was saying. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. But he bloody drummed well.”
Regardless of their conflicting origin story, both Rory and Sean agree they, as well as bandmates Patrick Barton Grace and Brad Woodward, all attended and somehow met at Bendigo Secondary Senior School. The school was built into the carcass of an old gaol—talk about saying the quiet part out loud—and the music rooms where the four spent most of their time was the old warden’s quarters, resplendent in exposed brick.
Before they were Nation Wild, the four cut their teeth on the Bendigo music scene: a small collection of pubs to gig in, and an annual multivenue Blues and Roots Festival. This lack of diversity was clearly frustrating for the young men. “It’s a lot of old guys playing ‘Sweet Home Chicago’” Sean tells me. “We moved to Melbourne for a reason.”
Sean picked up a guitar at a young age and was given lessons by his prep teacher. He then put the guitar back down again and forgot about it for a few years. In one of those magical stories that only could come from a rock band, it found its way back to him while watching his older brother jam with neighbours. From the beginning Sean was working on original compositions, though this wasn’t a conscious effort. “I’ve always just gotten joy out of writing. It just felt so good to write. Then when you get a band together you can actually explore some of those ideas.”
It wasn’t long before Sean was in his first band after gently conning his friend Matt into buying a drum kit. Sean and Matt formed the nucleus of their primary school band—named Green Eggs and Ham by Sean, to his immediate regret—and played at school events, even being taken to pubs to play.
With such a long history of playing live, Sean notes that it was naturally the most genuine way to promote the band. To overcome the challenge of bringing a live sound to a world from a state in lockdown, Nation Wild collaborated with Park Avenue Media and producer Guus Hoevenaars to record and film a live studio version of their 2020 single “Violence of Our Time”. The video was then packaged with another single, “Black Hat”, and used in a highly targeted Instagram advertising campaign. Their audience swelled as new listeners were swept up in droves, including yours truly.
Aside from the exceptional musicianship from all involved, “Violence of Our Time” stands out by incorporating a modern composition with a vintage tone. “I played the producer ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ by the Rolling Stones [from the 1971 album Sticky Fingers] and said that was the sort of production we were going for,” Sean tells me. It’s clear the band have a strong grasp on sonics, with Sean happy to elaborate on the nitty gritty. “Everyone is doing modern production with everything really scooped. We did the bell curves, [to get a] very raw rock ‘n’ roll sound.” The live cut is supplemented by Patrick Barton Grace’s synthesiser work, contrasting a thumping bass synth with twinkling chimes in the relatively quiet middle eight. The song crosses eras from seventies prog, briefly detouring into eighties synth-rock before crashing back to garage-thrash, its three musicians comfortably generating an expansive sound that would not seem out of place on a Spector production. As they would demonstrate on further releases, Nation Wild are not a band to be constrained by the borders of genre.
Nation Wild second single of 2020 and favoured goodnight song “Black Hat” runs just under seven minutes long. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it is their most popular track at over 70,000 streams on Spotify. In the tradition of epic-rock the listener is taken on a journey sonically and narratively. Much like “Violence of Our Time”, it mixes genres deftly, and Sean’s dynamic vocals have a certain raw edge to them, demonstrating that the band understands how to evoke a mood through production.
Appropriately, the song’s composition was also an extended journey, using a riff penned by Sean at age fourteen and lyrics that he devised while working in a dry cleaners years later. “I had to keep running back and forth between pressing shirts and coming up with sweet lyrics. I kept going to my phone in the tearoom and writing them down and humming into my phone.”
Lyrically, both songs match the intensity of their melodies. “Violence of Our Time” is a protest song, while “Black Hat” follows a soldier from the midst of battle through his struggle with the psychological afterlife of war. When I ask Sean about the politics in his lyrics, he is initially reluctant to respond. We take “Violence of Our Time” as our starting point, and Sean tells me that he had several philosophies that influenced his writing. “Some of it is going to annoy some people. But the idea of it was just to create an aggressive in-your-face song because that’s how I felt at the time. When I wrote it, it was before the climate rallies started, and I was getting really pissed off that no one was doing anything, especially the youth. I wanted the youth to get angry and do something.” The early promotional material for the single echoes this. Its Youtube description reads: “Violence of Our Time epitomises our current generation’s fight for change. The song is designed to motivate the youth, inspire those who know what is right for our future to take charge […] As we continue to refuse to be silent on issues that effect [sic] our lives including climate change, the young get stronger. We are taking over whether you like it or not.”
It soon becomes clear that Sean’s reticence comes from a reluctance to tie himself and the band with a specific movement, rather than a reluctance to speak his mind: “I don’t think we align ourselves with a particular political group, just because what purpose would that be? To let them come up with your viewpoints? We prefer just to have our own views.”
Evidently, many listeners felt the same, and the band was off to a running start. Nation Wild quickly garnered global appeal, receiving radio play in Latin America, and spawning dedicated social media pages created by fans in Germany and France. At the time of writing, Spotify locates Nation Wild’s biggest listener base not in Melbourne, but Mexico City.
2020 saw the band release two more singles: “Never Looked So Good”, “Adrenaline Kick”, which arrived with a promotional video featuring Matt, Green Eggs and Ham’s drummer, now a talented skater. The band’s latest release “Something About Love”, dropped around Valentine’s Day this year. The punchy disco-rock song showcases Rory’s drumming, which forms the perfect beat for a highly danceable track. The promotional material showcases Rory’s enviable legs in an ensemble of a corset, fishnets, and a full face of makeup. His incredible look was owing to he and Sean’s housemate, who also helped them put together a promotional video that exemplifies both the band’s confidence and sense of humour.
“I think we were going for something wacky and unexpected,” Rory tells me. While the imagery embodies the band’s spirit and attracts attention, it also attracted criticism when the band used it to promote their recent hometown gig at The Golden Vine. “Our ad campaign—especially the pictures of me looking really hot—it drew some really negative reactions. Especially making some straight white males question their sexuality.”
I float that the point of rock ‘n’ roll is to wind people up, and Sean enthusiastically agrees. “We did print off posters and [take] it into the pub to promote the gig. They kind of looked at the poster, then looked back at me, then looked around to see who was [there] eating lunch.”
Minor controversies aside, the band’s return to Bendigo proved a successful follow-up to their sold-out Melbourne date. Things got rowdy enough to prompt Sean to appropriate a punter’s table as a stage, shirt unbuttoned to the belt, and perform a cover of The Stooges “1969”. He tells me that he’s intentionally cultivated a bold stage manner, which helps loosen the room up and establish a mood, but that it comes from a genuine place.
From his keen fashion sense to his curly blond shag, Sean embodies the confidence that the band’s bio boasts of. His hair was the result of a long struggle including many years of straightening: a battle anyone with curls knows well. The longer one spends speaking to him, the clearer it becomes that he is intent on presenting the most spectacular, outlandish, and authentic version of himself. “If I don’t do that to the utmost of my ability, it annoys me. Not wearing over the top clothing does my head in. If I see a video of myself where I’m not wearing the coolest clothing I can find or playing as hard as I can it just annoys me looking at myself, so I just go all out. I want to go 110% all the time.” He stops, and quickly digresses, “Also, sorry, let’s go back to the haircut. I mean, look at this haircut. Look at that.” This is a far cry from the young man who, by his own admission, was “terrified” of managing his curly hair only a few years prior.
This in-your-face presentation and dedication to creating the best sound possible means that Nation Wild are often compared to the same bands that inspire them. Even I am not above this. When the band shared the “Something About Love” music video with me a few days prior to release, I told Sean that it was nice of both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to possess him for filming. In our interview, I ask him if these kinds of comments bother him. “That comment put my ego through the roof, you have no idea,” he replies. “I told everyone that.”
These comparisons aren’t flippant, and Nation Wild’s similarities to the greats of the industry are not due to superficial musical mimicry. If my conversation with Sean and Rory revealed one thing above all else, it’s that they are fountains of knowledge of and passion for good old rock ‘n’ roll, which Sean calls “an emotion and an attitude, more than a genre.”
Nation Wild have a busy year ahead of them. They’re planning a live studio album, and an EP recorded live at one of their gigs. They’ve got new merch coming, and are excited about the prospect of releasing physical editions of their work. A tour of the East coast is on the cards for the summer. On top of this, their next single is imminent, and Sean reassures me that it’s going to push their sound further and explore a new direction. In the spirit of crossing genres, this new track is country, but “not that shit modern country. Proper rock ‘n’ roll country.” When I ask them for specifics, Rory laughs and offers up Marty Robbins.
“That’s the headline,” Sean tells me. “Nation Wild go Marty Robbins. Gunfighter ballads from Melbourne.”
Nation Wild can be found on Spotify and Youtube. Follow them on Instagram for upcoming tour dates and news.
definitely something. 