[Exclusive Interview] 이내꿈 inaekkum: “We make music to tell people to walk the road of loving themselves.”

Photo Courtesy of  inaekkum 

Outside Seoul lies another city famous for its underground music scene and various musical acts. That is Daegu. Of course the bright lights of Seoul are known for the sparkling glimmers of K-pop, but the indie scene holds something much more powerful right now, and that’s reality. inaekkum is that act. “The band that turns its most private confessions into a hello for everyone.” That motto is something they do best on their latest single “Yips”, and that aforementioned reality surfaces. Set against a backdrop of ’00s beats, it’s a band I truly feel more should know. A band with such a passionate backstory that holds firm in their music. 

The four-piece made up of Min Wooseok (vocals, bass), Kim Taeyang (guitar), Choi Wonmin (keys), and 314 (Sam Il Sa) (drums) have the ability to release music that is layered not just in realism but also puts across a pastel fantasy land that has you drawn in. They know the world is tough, a struggle, and yet they’ve created music that allows you to feel all those emotions while rooting it all in hope. I had the pleasure of interviewing this group that I hope many will support. We talk in depth about their music journey, philosophical influences, and the Daegu music scene. 

The band began under the name ‘Come Here, I’ll Take You on My Dream’, which perfectly sums up your music. But firstly, what brought you all together to form a band and then eventually become inaekkum as we know you today?

My father passed away in March 2019. I took a leave from school right after, and I was stuck inside a single thought: that I had to stay alive. Music was still the only place I could be honest, and the part of me that didn’t want to live had nowhere to go — my father’s last words and my mother had both told me to live.

I had watched him go through chemotherapy. The radiation they used for the cancer that had spread to his brain took his memory as well. Life felt like nothing. But I had to find a reason to keep going.

I thought that if I started a band and stayed among people, at least I wouldn’t die. I had wanted to be in a band anyway. I didn’t want Wonmin – my classmate, and one of the most important friends I have — to quit music. And I wanted to say that everyone has the right to live, and the right to be happy in this world. That was how we started.

While we were preparing the first full-length album, the two founding members stopped making music. I felt we needed a new name, even if we carried everything else with us. I wanted the old name to stay as the name of the years we spent with them. So we took “inaekkum” — the shortened form our fans had been using for our full name.

In Korean, inae means “very soon,” “without delay,” “close by rather than far.” I usually describe it as a dream you can see faintly in the distance at dusk, blue and blurred. The dream looks far away, but it is actually close.

You’ve all mentioned how the band isn’t a lineup but a relationship. How have your relationships with each other over the years shaped how you create music together?

Wooseok: I don’t think a band is just the appeal of a certain instrument line-up. Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Red Hot Chili Peppers — they’ve made music together for a very long time. That’s the kind of band I wanted. Music with people inside it. So I think relationships are what a band actually is. That’s the substance of it. I watched the documentary about Hillel very closely, and I still enjoy following where RHCP went after John came back.

We’re a mess. The reason we keep making music anyway is in “Noise”, on our first album. We’re the only witnesses to each other’s lack and each other’s pain, up close.

The debt we’ve taken on as a band works the same way. On paper it sits under an individual name, but we have never once thought of it as belonging to one person. It’s inaekkum’s debt. Honestly, we don’t think about it much. What we do have is a constant wish for each other to grow and to try things, and I think that attitude is what shows most on stage.

Our new single “Yips” is like that too. Taeyang wrote the song and gave it its title. It’s the first song in inaekkum written by someone other than me. I had been waiting a long time for that moment. I found my own story inside it. 314 and Taeyang both love baseball, so that came in naturally.

Wonmin: We’re all different in personality and in taste. We can see and go through the same thing and take it in completely differently. So we make time to share often. If you want to keep a band going, I think trust is what matters most in the end. If you trust each other and work through things together, you become each other’s engine.

Along with that sentiment, you also labelled yourself as “the band that turns its most private confessions into a hello for everyone.” That saying is so layered, personal, and something that makes people gravitate towards a musician. Who is that musician for you all, be it now or when growing up?

Wooseok: Jason Mraz gave me the courage to make music during a turbulent time. I listened to his albums every night in middle school. In my first year of high school I came across Japanese music — Asian Kung-Fu Generation, RADWIMPS, and SEKAI NO OWARI. That’s when my prejudices fell away and my ears opened. And David Berman, of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains — I listened to his life a great deal.

Still, if I have to name one person, it’s Masafumi Gotoh of Asian Kung-Fu Generation. I love his detail even more than his music. I look to him because I want to become a delicate and tender person. Even the fact that I’ve kept a blog since 2020 began with reading his diary.

Taeyang: For me, it’s Muse. They’re the band that got me into band music in the first place — the first time I understood what a band actually was.

As a band that would rather be great than famous, do you feel nowadays it’s more important to stay true to your artistry instead of switching to fast trends?

Yes, I think it’s more important. Not because there’s anything admirable about us, but because if we don’t, our music stops doing what it’s meant to do.

We make music to tell people to walk the road of loving themselves. And the thing that gets in the way of that road most is a life spent chasing trends.

The world right now is built so that it’s difficult to refuse what the algorithm and capital hold out to you. It’s easy to lose yourself, and it’s made to feel like there’s no real cost to postponing the work of finding yourself. Far too many people compare themselves to others and despair over falling short.

If you make music in that state and then tell people to love themselves, it becomes a lie.

I think being famous is a question of how many people you reached, and being great is a question of how deeply you reached one person. We chose the second. Trends are a question of speed. What matters to us is direction.

Forming in Daegu, what is the indie community like, and what does Daegu give that you don’t think you could have found elsewhere?

Daegu is a UNESCO City of Music. But most people in Daegu don’t know that and don’t know indie music exists here either. On the other hand, the scene is small enough that everyone knows everyone. We keep trying to make indie culture visible, but musicians and audiences still drain away to Seoul and Busan.

Club Heavy — you could call it Daegu’s CBGB — turns 30 this year. We’re playing the anniversary show in September, and we’re also building the website and handling the mix. A venue that has stayed in one place for that long gives musicians strength simply by still being there. It’s something like a pillar you lean on.

If you ask what is specific to Daegu, it’s that you have to make everything yourself here. That’s why we organise our own show series, “Indie Delegation”, to connect musicians in the region. Not because we’re anything special. Because nobody else was doing it.

Plenty of people leave. Which is exactly why some people stay and break ground. We’re the second kind.

A plane that crosses the Pacific needs a runway just as long. We think of Daegu as that runway. We’re not only trying to take off ourselves — we keep laying it down for whoever takes off next. Together with the people who listen to us.

You’ve gone from Daegu to Taiwan to the UK. When did you realise your music could travel outside South Korea?

We did a mini tour in Taiwan at the end of last November. Even boarding the plane, it didn’t feel real. But I felt it on stage — that our music could travel outside the country. I even started to think the response might be bigger out there than at home in Daegu.

On the flight back, that short trip already felt so meaningful that from last December we began turning our plans for touring abroad into something concrete. And the chance came far sooner than we’d imagined.

Was there anything about the UK audience’s response that surprised you the most while doing your shows? Was there a song you were intrigued to see them connect with?

The UK and Sweden tour that began on April 30th at the Ulster Sports Club in Belfast was the best. It was the band’s first time in the UK. For 314 it was his first time leaving the country at all — he got his first passport for it, even though he’s the oldest of us.

At Sound City, watching people drink and dance and enjoy themselves to our music, getting a bigger response than we get where we live, gave us a lot of courage. The crowd was wild. Afterwards, someone came up and told us we were the best show they’d seen during that Sound City.

There were also journalists who came to interview us, and what they asked was why our music moves across so many genres, and what the philosophy underneath it is. Being asked without having to explain first was new for us.

And I can’t forget talking about lyrics directly with people after the shows. “Karman Line” is a song I wrote after losing a pet, and in both Sweden and the UK, people showed me photographs of their own dogs, and we talked about them. That meant a great deal to me.

Let’s talk about your latest release, “Yips”. On the surface it has this infectious early-2000s indie-rock energy, but underneath it is dealing with humiliation, expectation and dissociation. Why was baseball the metaphor you chose?

“Yips” is a baseball term. A player who could always throw suddenly can’t anymore. The head knows, and the body won’t follow.

Taeyang, our guitarist, wrote the song and gave it that title, and the title gave me the image I needed. I looked at my life as a single baseball game. You make the decisive error, the runner on second is looking at you and laughing, and there’s still a lot of game left. My life was like that. I’ve always been bad at forgiving myself, and that made living very painful.

I lived with the fear that I could be substituted off that stage at any moment, and for a long time I felt like I wasn’t myself. There’s a line in the lyrics – “I missed the dream” — which means I missed the ball and I missed the dream at once.

As always, your lyrics sound so philosophical, with a specific lyric in “Yips” about “blaming the head for not following the body”. Do you do a lot of self-reflection before songwriting, or does it come naturally during the process?

Both, but the order is usually reversed.

The process is simple. When I pick up a guitar and start writing, words and feelings I’ve been carrying unconsciously come out. I sing the melody and the words together and look for the hint inside those words.

Sometimes lyrics I wrote unconsciously become clear years later. Looking back at the first album’s lyrics while writing the second, I see things I couldn’t see then. Music doesn’t lie. I thought I’d been hiding all along, and it turned out I hadn’t been.

For the second album, and for “Yips” and “Single Cup,” there was a large image that came out of reflection first, and I wrote the lyrics toward that theme. Each song feels independent on its own, but once you’ve heard them all and found the fragments of the hidden story inside them, you can feel how they connect.

Wooseok, you in particular have been through some incredibly tough life events, yet your music seems to be a gateway to some upbeat fantasy land. It’s fair to say music is a form of escapism. Do you find that by confronting your past it actually heals you and moves you forward?

There were definitely periods when it was an escape. And I don’t think escape is only a bad thing. You have to be alive to be able to face anything.

It’s a little different now. I lived from the age of seven believing I was guilty, and for a long time changing that belief was much harder than knowing the facts. Telling yourself that something you’ve held for over twenty years isn’t true turns out to be the harder task.

To get past death, and to get out of an existential depression, what’s absolutely necessary is forgiveness of yourself, acknowledgement, and acceptance without blame. If you can acknowledge even the moments when you were escaping, I believe those become part of the journey too.

I don’t feel that I’m escaping through music now. These days I make music in order to love myself.

You’ve described songwriting as a “form of self-revelation”. For all of you, is writing music something that helps you understand yourself, or does the meaning of a song arrive only after you’ve written it and it’s released?

Wooseok: After. Almost always. While I’m making it, I’m just making it. The meaning arrives once it’s out, once we’ve played it a few times, or once someone tells me about that song. That’s why I tend to think I want to be exhumed. I want to be dug up. That’s the only way what I want to say gets through.

Taeyang: When we were making “Single Cup,” I thought it was just a single. Looking back, it turned out to be the epilogue of Organic Tender and the prologue of MY at the same time. I wasn’t thinking about that while we made it.

Following that, with such profound lyrics, is writing something you’ve always gravitated towards, be it journal writing? They’re honest, yet tender. Where did that passion stem from?

I dropped out of school at seventeen and took the high-school equivalency exam, and I wrote this at the time — “I wanted to become a moon that shows its wounds, so I began to write down my sins.”

So it didn’t start because I loved writing. It started because there was nothing else I could do. I’ve kept writing ever since. I like writing poems. Poetry naturally fell away once the band began, and now I leave diaries and short prose on the blog.

These days I think what’s bigger is wanting to pass something on. That someone like me exists. That it’s alright. That you’re alright exactly as you are.

Out of all your tracks, which one do you feel is the most healing, and which are you most proud of?

Wooseok: The song that healed me most is “will”.

The title holds two meanings at once — a will, as in what you leave behind, and will as in being able to. I wrote it during a time when wanting to die and having to live were both unbearable.

Then, long after it came out, someone told me they got through their exam-retake year with that song. Once I knew that something I wrote in order to end things had comforted somebody else, I started hearing it differently. To be exact, what healed me wasn’t the song. It was what that person said.

The song I’m proudest of is “Yips” — because I didn’t write it.

It’s the first song in inaekkum written by a member other than me. I’d been waiting a long time for that. For the moment the band stopped being one person’s. Taeyang wrote both the song and the title, and I found my own story inside that title. I’m prouder of this than of my own songs.

Wonmin: For healing I’d choose “Light.” The line about being willing to become the light that shines on you can stand in for so many kinds of love.

314: The one I find healing is “Noise,” and the one I’m proudest of is “Before Sunrise.” I was in another band before I joined inaekkum, and “Noise” was born when I wasn’t here yet. In this band we talk a lot, without hiding things. That’s what makes me grow.

Your full-length album Organic Tender navigates so many themes but also has no genre. For you, what was the most important aspect in making this record?

The most important thing was the courage to speak in my own voice. I tried to face the feeling of loss honestly, without making it beautiful. And I’m still in the middle of that.

The title says the same thing. Organic points to us as a band, people tangled together, and Tender means soft, fragile, kind, young — and also painful to the touch. That last one is us.

“Noise” is that story. After we argue in the rehearsal room, there’s a long silence with nothing in it but amp noise. It isn’t the silence full of noise that makes you uneasy — it’s that everyone’s thoughts spill over into it.

At what point during the recording process did you realise this was more than a record, but a moment of liberation? That this was the exact album you needed to make at that time.

During the vocal recording for “Single Cup,” I felt free in a recording session for the first time. Saying openly that I live with C-PTSD and anxiety, and that I take medication for it, made me feel free. And confessing that I love my life, that I love music, made me feel I was standing on this world with both feet.

Your lyrics are a mix of Korean but primarily in English. What does writing in English allow you to express that Korean perhaps doesn’t?

My mother understands Korean, you know. So when I write in English, I think I can be a little more honest.

There are reasons behind which language I use, and I don’t want to explain all of them. But we’re Korean, and we play most of our shows in Korea. Sometimes I write in English because I don’t want what I’m saying to land too sharply on our Korean listeners. Sometimes it’s because I want to keep something as a metaphor. And it works the other way round too — I want listeners abroad who don’t know Korean to hear us as music first, and come closer to our world through that.

With such an extensive discography layered in philosophical concepts, your art reflects a depth that feels lacking in some music. Have you always been interested in following philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, whom you list as an influence?

Honestly, I didn’t bring philosophy in to look clever or to dress music up as scholarship. For me, philosophy was closer to a survival tool.

For a long time there were nights I couldn’t sleep, gripped by an anxiety I couldn’t explain and a fear of death. Coming across Heidegger’s existentialism then let me take a full breath. He told me that anxiety — Angst — is not a defect that comes from weakness, but a necessary signal that pulls you out of the meaningless ideas the world has laid down and stands you in front of your own real existence. The insight that only by looking directly at death, instead of avoiding it, can you decide on your own possibilities — that came close to salvation for me.

For me, making music is the process of not letting that enormous anxiety and those wounds simply scatter, but putting them into a vessel made of sound and story. What I want to pass on isn’t difficult theory. It’s the most honest answer I have to how are we supposed to live anyway, inside a life full of contradiction and pain. And I want to say how beautiful it is to choose to exist.

International audiences may perceive music from South Korea as primarily K-pop. For independent artists, do you think it’s harder to break out of that stereotype, or is there more openness to looking beyond K-pop now?

I don’t see it as a disadvantage at all. K-pop has increased the number of people willing to listen to Korean music at least once. On the UK tour, a lot of people already knew the Korean word for love.

Even before we went abroad, BTS fans in Korea and overseas were supporting us first. For a band like us — with no capacity for promotion and barely enough room to make the music itself — I think K-pop has a great deal to do with why we’re able to receive that kind of attention and affection at all.

There was a review after this single came out that I enjoyed: “It gives you something catchy first, then slowly makes you wonder what exactly you’ve been singing along to.”

In the end, I think it’s on us to prove it through the music. When people talk about music from Korea, we have to show that there is also music like ours.

Finally, what does the rest of the year have in store for you all?

Wooseok: We have a few shows in September. The Club Heavy 30th anniversary show on September 19th is a big one for us. There are other shows as well, and in October and November there are two more pre-release singles from the second album — both of them play a symbolic role. In December, a novel comes out. The music stands on its own, but the novel is a deeper story that lets listeners decode the world of the second album themselves.

Personally, I’m going to sleep more and do less. That’s my plan for the rest of the year.

Taeyang: If we can, I’d like to play one more festival abroad.

Wonmin: Our second album MY comes out in March 2027. We’re working on it now, and the rest of this year is recording and everything that goes with it.

314: I hope we do what we planned and arrive properly where we’re going.