Balming Tiger are penned as âalternative K-popâ, which tells you something but not nearly enough. The Seoul collective, with eleven members, was founded in 2018, a sprawl of rappers, singer-songwriters, producers and directors. They make music that swerves between jazz and hip hop, post-punk and soul-funk, all within the space of a single album, and somehow it all holds together.
Their 2023 debut âJanuary Never Diesâ felt like falling down a rabbit hole; âGongbuâ, their second, out today, goes deeper still.
This time the concept is a fictional research institute called âGongbu Koreaâ (gongbu means âstudyâ in Korean) where experimental technology is used to record human dreams. It sounds elaborate, but the album wears it lightly: fourteen tracks of psychedelic sounds layered over Korean and East Asian musical textures, dreamlike and nostalgic and faintly hallucinatory.
Lead single âKeep Onâ has one of the collective, Omega Sapien, wandering through a dream; previous single âHomeâ had five members each reinterpreting the concept of home from their own emotional angle.
The whole thing is conceived as a multimedia universe, sound, visuals, video direction and live show all locked into a single narrative.