Korean punk trio Sailor Honeymoon return with their infectious debut EP ‘Sailor Honeymoon’, a fresh new punk-rock offering that references various sub-genres of punk past and present while challenging the dominant idea of Korean music as K-pop.
The Seoul-based 3-piece burst onto the scene in May last year with their explosive debut single “Cockroach” which came out via new the Seoul-via-London label Good
Good 굿굿 Records. BBC 6 Music-championed “Cockroach” was heralded as an ‘important arrival’ in the vein of The Ramones, Kim Gordon and Bikini Kill.
“Bad Apple”, a track written about an ugly vibe within the friendship group, received support from BBC 6, BBC 1, and BBC 2. The music video, directed by Kim Taeyoung, was nominated for the upcoming Focus Wales Film Festival.
“PMS Police” is the satirical follow-up about “the way people sometimes freak out over a PMSing woman”.
“Fxxk Urself” , the fourth and final single, is “a song dedicated to all the fuckboys”.
The 8-track project was tracked live over a week in London by producer Luke Smith (Foals, Depeche, Shura) and mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer (Parquet Courts, Temples).
The band’s intention is to create noisy, loose, and improvised on-the-spot rock music, accompanied by the freedom to say whatever they want to. This unfiltered way of making music is an intentional act of rebellion in a country known for its heavily commercialised pop industry.
“Sailor Honeymoon” was born as a collaboration between photographer Abi Raymaker 장인화 and techno DJ Zaeeun Shin 신재은. Their vision was realised at jams with other friends in a shared practice room where their noisy loose improvisation was charged with chemistry, a small act of rebellion in a country where pop culture encourages artists (and women) to be flawless and pristine. The spontaneity of the project leads Sailor Honeymoon to do things like swapping instruments when jamming and calling all their female fans onstage at shows, earning them a growing reputation in Seoul's music scene.
Raymaker says,
“For us, Sailor Honeymoon is our chance to express ourselves without being edited or corrected in any way. We’re not perfect musicians and we’re not mimicking anything in particular. We take inspiration from stuff directly around us too, from women in our scene, or from each other, and run with it rather than trying to make something clean or perfect.”
They will celebrate the EP’s release with an all-female lineup show in Seoul on 3 May 2024, in advance of a run of shows in the UK and France with a London headline at Sebright Arms on 14 May 2024. Tickets can be found in the link.
Homemade photo zines of the album-making process and “Korean Girls Invented Punk Rock Not England” T-shirts will be for sale at all shows.
‘Sailor Honeymoon’ is out now on Good Good 굿굿 Records.