Veröffentlicht
Jun 11, 2024
- A high-stakes debut album that feels a little too low stakes.
- Peggy Gou is flying her private jet over uncharted waters. Among the most successful women in dance music ever, she's done it all on her terms, and no amount of underground naysaying can change that. Blockbuster DJ sets, endless fashion shoots and partnerships, beauty lines, international chart hits and a history you can trace to Radio Slave's Rekids label. She's never been boring, either. From Berlin neighbour disputes to modelling and appearing in every fashion magazine on Earth, to the endless flying around the world antics—there's plenty to talk about. She both revels in this narrative and keeps it at arm's length, with a woman-of-few-words demeanour that makes her seem like even more of a celebrity. But there's always been music to back it up: which house head could deny the charms of "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)?" The Korean producer has one foot in the pop world and one foot in the rave like few have managed before, and to paraphrase Charli XCX's BRAT, released on the same day as Gou's much-anticipated debut album: she doesn't fucking care what you think.
All that is to say that I Hear You, which lands on indie giant XL Recordings, is a high-stakes gambit. But to Gou's credit—and sometimes detriment—it doesn't feel like one. One of the most unusual and intriguing things about the Korean producer is the foundation she made her career from: low-key deep house jams in the vein of '80s Ibiza and the Pachanga Boys. They often came with pop vocal hooks, in Gou's inimitable deep voice, but they were hardly the stuff of Tomorrowland headline sets. And I Hear You is built around the string of increasingly successful Balearic pop singles Gou has released in the past couple of years, including the imperial "(It Goes Like) Nanana," the breezy "I Go" and more recently, the weird-but-satisfying Lenny Kravitz collab "I Believe In Love Again." That's the first anticlimactic part of the album: you've already heard half of it by the time it comes out.
It's hard to be mad, because singles are Gou's best work. "(It Goes Like) Nanana" is an uncanny throwback that combines early '90s acid house with late-'90s Eurodance—including that immortal ATB pitch-bent synth—while her work on the Kravitz collab makes up for the actor-singer's pinched falsetto. There's a blissful piano refrain and an impossibly cool monologue from Gou, who can make even trite lines like "You gonna find what you're looking for" seem profound and sexy. You almost wish she sang the whole thing.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is made of album tracks, not singles. Aside from the throwaway intro "Your Art," with its tossed-off, on-trend mentions of colonisation and industrialisation, we've got "Back To One," which feels like a wordier version of "(It Goes Like) Nanana." "All That" is a passable but out-of-place duet with Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano. It has a basic verse-chorus-verse structure and sounds like a royalty-free pop song you might hear piping out of a nicely perfumed hotel bathroom. The spa-music piano and acidic licks on "Purple Horizon" are as surface-level evocative as the track's resort postcard title. (20 listens later, I still can't recall what it sounds like.) Only "Lobster Telephone," with a fetching keyboard line and gibberish Korean vocals—likely some kind of play on Korean music's use of English lyrics and English-speaking audiences' fetishisation of Korea—is worth its weight in salt.
Even the more generic moments are enjoyable, which makes I Hear You frustrating for an album as rock-solid as it is. There's hardly a bad moment on it, but it doesn't match the grace, candour or personality of the artist releasing it, nor does it have the wistful subtlety of some of her earlier tracks. It's not a case of major-league debut syndrome, because there are few failed commercial leaps or cringeworthy collaborations. You still get the sense that Gou had complete control, and the album sounds like her through and through—but it's mired in the nothingness between going-for-broke pop music and halfhearted dance music. Bridging that pop-underground divide has always been what makes Gou an interesting artist, but on I Hear You, she can't seem to veer from the middle of the road.
Instead of providing fuel for the haters, or food for the fans, I Hear You is more like fodder for streaming. She could probably make music like this in her sleep—that's a testament to her obvious talent. Massive hits like "It Goes Like (Nanana)" are not load-bearing enough to hold up a whole album, especially a year after they came out. So I Hear You crumbles under its own weight, as well as the weight of its creator's supersized persona. It has tracks worth replaying, and even its worst moments aren't likely to get turned off at a party. Gou remains immensely likeable, if you're the kind of music fan that likes her. I Hear You isn't a masterpiece, and it's not a failure. Instead, it's some tragic third thing: just OK.
Tracklist01. Your Art
02. Back To One
03. I Believe In Love Again (with Lenny Kravitz)
04. All That (feat. Villano Antillano)
05. (It Goes Like) Nanana
06. Lobster Telephone
07. Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)
08. I Go
09. Purple Horizon
10. 1+1=11