Parannoul and the New Generation of Korean Indie

A year later, in 2023, Parannoul and I meet at a cafe in Yeonhui-dong. “I wasn’t nervous,” he says, when the Rolling Hall show comes up, “but I did wonder: Will we stay in touch? Or will we just play one show together and then go our separate ways?” he remembers. The gig, dubbed Digital Dawn by its organizers, was intended as an IRL showcase for Seoul’s new generation of indie artists, who until then had chiefly shared their work on the internet. “Despite my tendency to stay inside, I found myself actually talking a lot,” says Parannoul of his initial meetings with the other artists, where they planned the concert over barbecue. “After that realization, I got a little bit more positive.”

The Parannoul in front of me today is not the same artist who once lamented his own “fucking awful” vocals in interviews, and whose cult popularity on RateYourMusic.com apparently brought him more anxiety than joy. To See the Next Part of the Dream, the album that made him internet-famous, had the resignation of a lonely adolescent romantic on the verge of giving up. Now, he admits to a certain ambition: “I’ve already gotten this far, so maybe I can keep moving forward.”

None of this seemed possible to him when he first started making music with a free trial of a recording program in his bedroom as a high school student, inspired by bands like Arcade Fire and Mogwai. In those days, he says, he was finishing a new album every month. When he graduated high school and got the results for the Suneung, Korea’s notoriously grueling college entrance exams, he was disappointed. “I did poorly, so I decided to stop making music and focus solely on studying for a year,” he says. He poured himself into a “final” album before stepping back: Let’s Walk on the Path of a Blue Cat, his first release under the Parannoul moniker. The record dropped to little fanfare, and he went off to hit the books for another year, carrying the stigma of a jaesusaeng: the Korean name for a student retaking the national college entrance exam, a title associated with underachievement and social despair.

“In those days my dream was to become a musician. But I had no results to speak of, and had earned no money from my music,” he says. A second shot at the Suneung yielded another disappointing score, sending him into deeper anguish: “Everyone around me had already gone to college, and if I was again the only one who didn’t go, I’d truly be a failure.” He decided to cut his losses, go to whatever college would accept his scores—but not before making one more “final” album. For real this time. “I was like, this second album, it’s really the last one,” he says. “For the last time, I’ll dwell on my misfortune, then I have to go to college.”