CHASEDAE 

For a long time, Chasedae was a band known only through word of mouth, passed along by those who had seen them live. Now, they finally unveil their first full-length album. Like a party where all kinds of music and all kinds of characters come together, The King of Dance has a strange power: it sweeps the listener along without pause, only to leave them unexpectedly wistful before they know it.

There are days when you cry because the sorrow is too much.
No, not just sometimes. Probably more often than that.

In shabby bars
waiting for someone to start a conversation
and wondering why
every time you turn on your phone
it only makes you feel lonelier
because it feels like you are the only one
On days like that, I would drift into places like cinemas for no particular reason

Sometimes I think this about rock bands:
a game of calling one another geniuses.
Because we used to sleep
on streets where customers came and went,
doesn’t that kind of game suit us pretty well?

Even when the person you love leaves,
even when your mother and father fall ill,
I felt I would still want to keep singing.
So I decided to call the title
of this new story "MRHG" (lightheartedly)

Be that as it may,
what we have to do has not changed, has it?
To love, and to stay together.
To eat, to laugh, and to cry.
To put on a favourite pair of jeans and lift your spirits.
To reach that feeling of lightheartedness.

My friends
We love a lighthearted spirit.
If the love contained in this album
could make the world lighthearted as well
I could ask for nothing more

The first statement from Chasedae, your next generation

For some time, word had been going around that a peculiar band was turning up at the live clubs around Hongdae. Sometimes they appeared with make-up on their faces and long, dangling accessories; other times they showed up in clean-cut suits. Onstage, they unsettled audiences with jokes no one could quite make sense of, and though they always claimed to have met one another while travelling abroad, the city where this had supposedly happened changed every time, making it impossible to tell what, if anything, was true. Their lyrics were no less elusive: one moment they sang of sorrowful love, the next they spun made-up tales like something from a fairy story, and at other times they suddenly broke into bizarrely solemn manifestos. They called themselves ‘Chasedae.’ 

Chasedae did not even have so much as a SoundCloud channel, so the only chance to hear their music was at live shows whose time and place were never quite certain. Only now, at last, have they decided to release some of their work in the form of an EP.

On first listen, Chasedae’s debut EP The Next Generation may feel surprising above all else. Unlike their rough-edged, vaguely delinquent image, the music comes across as more “well-behaved” than one might expect. But listen a little more closely, and the songs reveal the same hard-to-define, many-sided character that Chasedae have shown all along.

This is clear even from the track titles. The first track, “Shakespeare,” is a name familiar to everyone, yet as a song title it feels strangely unfamiliar. The song itself also seems, at first glance, simple, direct, and repetitive, but the experimental sounds that softly persist underneath it, like incense burning in the corner of a room, give “Shakespeare” a character that resists any existing genre.

The second track, “East Sea,” likewise takes the shape of an upbeat surf-rock song, yet lyrically it carries a loneliness that recalls a homesick wanderer, creating a curious imbalance. “Lady Pane,” meanwhile, brings together dreamy sounds and lyrics rich in striking imagery, giving shape to a sensibility distinctly Chasedae’s own. 

After this brief journey, the title track “Son” arrives, and all at once they take on the voice of a father with a son, offering advice and courage in words that are plain yet stirring. And it is here, precisely, that the identity gathered in the name ‘Chasedae’ reveals itself. The speaker may stand in the place of a father, but the “son” addressed in the line “Ring out, O cry of the boy, like an Indian shout” is also, paradoxically, Chasedae themselves: the ones who inherit that charge and carry its larger ambition forward. At the same time, Chasedae hand those same words to their listeners as well. 

In other words, the “next generation” they imagine is an age of romance brought into being by four young men who, without embarrassment, send their melancholy and largeness of spirit out into the world—and by the listeners who take up that meaning in turn. This EP, The Next Generation, is the first flag Chasedae plant above the grey city in the name of that vision. How many people will gather at the sight of that flag is something all of us may now watch with hopeful anticipation. 

Even now, they always introduce themselves onstage with the same words:
“We are Chasedae — your next generation.”

When summer comes, we often go looking for the sea, as if drawn there by something. Some go to see it for happy reasons, others for sad ones, but what is the same for everyone is that it leaves behind an unforgettable memory. Chasedae’s EP HAEBICHI depicts the sea in its many different faces. From a white sand beach full of joy to a night sea lost in thought, HAEBICHI follows the beach through the flow of time, and fully captures the many emotions we feel as we travel.

In this oversaturated age, everyone is hollow inside, lonely, and heartsick.
They, too, break head-on through such storms
and arrive at a single conclusion:
the only answer, and the wish of everyone:
“In the end, it is all just love.”

All great figures and heroes have fallen,
and only those who remain send their dreams across the sea.
The five tracks written together by these four young men
have something of the same quality
as the romance letters we once wrote
with all our hearts, in some season of our lives.
The rock and roll we long for, the rock and roll we love
Chasedae’s new release, Lie. 

That everything is mere chance
only makes me love you more!

From a small room in Yeonnam-dong to the banquet hall of a great ship, Chasedae, your next generation, return with the single "Titanic."

From writer Sulla Lee’s Instagram, Daily Sulla Lee, to a festival on the streets of Sinchon, to live clubs at the edge of Hongdae, Chasedae have drawn wider attention in all sorts of places since making their debut last January with the EP The Next Generation. Their hymn to romance, sung somewhere between garage rock and old pop, may belong to a previous generation, but it has been enough to catch the attention of the present one. And now Chasedae, our next generation, release the first single on the way to their full-length album.

Named after the ship Titanic, known to us all, this single stands out as an attempt to emphasise splendour in place of the simple structures and style of their earlier songs. It carries the hope of bringing the people one loves into the banquet hall of a great ship and sharing a party with them there. Beginning with a calm monologue and rising toward a climax filled with a flamboyant brass section, the song gives the feeling of looking out the window at glittering lights. If you dwell on the lyrics knowing that all the members of Chasedae live together in a small villa in Yeonnam-dong, you begin to reach the conclusion that the protagonist of this song may in fact be Chasedae themselves.

In the end, Titanic is a song about the love and hope that Chasedae themselves dream of. The hope that, though for now they are looking out the window, one day they will go out beyond it and dance beneath those glittering lights. This summer, let us join Chasedae, who will beautifully adorn the listener’s hot summer nights.

As the weather grew very cold
and there was nowhere to stay,
I once slipped quietly
into the dawn prayer room of a small church
at the mouth of an alley in Hapjeong-dong.
Among the believers, the children, the elderly,
among lovers who had slipped in because they could not afford a room,
and a married couple now so worn down it hurt,
quiet speaking in tongues was flowing out.

I have never once believed in You,
but because of scenes like this
sad, joyful, beautiful
it feels as though we ought to say something,
as though we ought at least to sing out loud.

La la la la la

Chasedae’s Christmas Eve single, Nazareth,
released borrowing Jesus’s birthday.

Even without religion,
in an old cathedral,
everyone closes their eyes, don’t they?