Bye Bye Badman

Bye Bye Badman's self-titled song announces a band that took its name from a Stone Roses track and meant it — this is Korean indie built on British guitar-pop bones, jangle and swagger and a rhythm section that swings rather than pounds. The production keeps the guitars bright and slightly trebly, layered in the Madchester tradition where the riff is a groove rather than a chord chart, and the drums have that loose baggy shuffle that shouldn't work in a language with Korean's syllabic rhythm but somehow does. The vocal is deliberately unheroic — half-buried in the mix, more attitude than technique, phrases delivered with the cool disaffection that the genre requires and that Korean indie of the Hongdae 2010s scene adopted as its posture. Lyrically it's a self-mythologizing gesture, the band naming itself into existence, which is either callow or perfect depending on your mood. The cultural context matters: this was the era when Seoul's indie scene stopped apologizing for its Anglophilia and started producing bands that could have played Manchester in 1990 without a translator. Play it walking through Hongdae on a spring evening before the clubs open, or in a car with the windows down when you want to feel like the main character.