It’s about time the wider world caught up with Silica Gel. Since initially forming a decade ago, the South Korean band have consistently made records that surge with creativity, from the wiry ’80s alt-pop of their 2016 self-titled debut’s ‘Everybody Does’ to the majestic sprawl of 2023’s ‘Ryudejakeiru’. But although they’ve already been hailed as heroes of Korea’s indie scene, they’ve yet to receive the widespread acclaim they deserve further afield.
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‘Ballad Of You’, their third album, could change that. When the four-piece spoke to NME last summer, around their Japanese Breakfast collaboration ‘NamgungFEFERE’, drummer Kim Geonjay told us: “We have one goal, which is trying to do something fun.” This record certainly achieves that aim, taking madcap tangents and running with them with glee, whether they’re creating busy but bright interludes like ‘Crybaby’, indulging in squealing guitar solos amid the plink-plonk of single ‘Molecular Gastronomy’ or bouncing through the strutting sheen of ‘Postpink’.
By the time you reach ‘You Just Wanna Have Some Fun’ in the middle of the tracklist, then, you’ll likely be expecting the playfulness to go off the scale based on the title alone. Yet here, Silica Gel toy with us, instead delivering an instrumental piece led by polished organ chords that fade out in a drone. On the surface, it might be less fun than the rest of this ideas-stuffed record, but it’s cheeky and irreverent in its own way; a subtle piece of humour for the album’s centrepiece.
It’s not just in the music that the Seoul-based band possess depth. ‘Ballad Of You’ is packed with conceptual intricacies, taking its foundations from Osamu Tezuka’s unfinished manga series Phoenix. In each of the 12 stories in the series, the cartoonist explores reincarnation and immortality, and Silica Gel spin off those themes with their own idea of “spiral molting” – or the notion that reincarnation is less about repeating life than progressing forward. “Still waiting on the words I once banished / To carry it into the next life”, Kim Hanjoo sings on the urgent whirl of ‘Big Void’.
As intriguing as Silica Gel’s third album is, it does lack some of the potency of its predecessor, 2023’s ‘Power Andre 99’. Even through meandering moments like ‘Up Quark’, though, their brilliance shines through enough to keep you hooked. And that – more so than writing in English, as they do more than ever here – is what will hopefully finally catch the attention of a larger global audience for this singular band.
Details
Record label: CAM
Release date: August 20, 2026
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