“Everything, even before the music, was mostly about expressing whatever you had inside, and doing it the way you wanted to do it … Now that there’s an audience, it doesn’t make that big of a difference,” he asserts. But it hasn’t always been easy: ​“At the same time, I had my phone and my social media hacked by my fans, I’ve had music stolen and leaked by my fans, and I’ve had family members contacted, so it’s difficult to separate the consumer, or the people who are involved emotionally in what you do, from your life and what you’re doing,” he adds. ​“In some ways, they insert themselves into the thing whether I like it or not. Like, if somebody really wants to hack you, you’re gonna get hacked.”

The music on E reads, at times, like a direct feed from Ecco’s mind. Through impressionistic lyrics and clear, confessional delivery, Arogundade’s vocals offer an open window into unbridled trains of thought. It’s clear that he’s taken pains to unsparingly portray the growthful states of mind he passed through in order to write the album. On the brief skit that preludes Fruit Bleed Juice, Arogundade rips a phrase directly from a late-night Notes app diary session: ​“I feel like I’m flying and sinking at the same time /​Like I’m being pulled from below and from above /​In every direction, at once.”

Striving to protect his naive creative impulses, Arogundade often purposefully secluded himself from friends and collaborators as he recorded himself and arranged the record. ​“If there were people in the room, I would just ask them to leave,” he explains. ​“I felt that it was more fun to do it that way, there was more creative control and more freedom … When no one’s watching, you can do whatever the fuck you want. I behave pretty differently in general, so I wanted to be in that place while recording, as well.”

Still, Arogundade keeps a degree of distance between the project and his personal identity, to maintain the sense that he is (and does) more than what comes across in his music. ​“The way I feel about it is that Ecco is something I do; it’s not who I am,” he says. ​“It’s more of a vehicle, or a vessel. It’s not a name or identity that I assign to myself. The relationship is more close, I guess, because I use my voice and my body and my feelings and my experiences to embody this project … But I wouldn’t call myself Ecco.”

Arogundade made E slowly and carefully, and only with deeply trusted collaborators. The record is executive-produced by Gud, neé Carl-Mikael Berlander, a Sad Boys member who’s responsible for some of the cohort’s biggest tracks, as well as the majority of Lean’s Unknown Death 2002 and Warlord projects. Berlander is one of the few producers with whom Arogundade has worked – ​“fewer people than you can count on one hand,” aside from whitearmor, the most prolific Drain Gang producer, who also contributed beats to E.