여름가을겨울 (그리고 봄)

Jannabi's "여름가을겨울 (그리고 봄)" moves through time the way memory does — not linearly, but in layers that accumulate feeling rather than narrative. The production leans heavily into a warm, analog aesthetic: clean electric guitar melodies that recall 1970s Korean folk-pop, a rhythm section that shuffles rather than drives, and a mix that sounds deliberately worn at the edges, like a record that has been played too many times in a room that smells of old wood. The song is structured around the full cycle of seasons, which gives it an epic emotional sweep contained within a surprisingly intimate frame. Choi Jung-hoon's vocal delivery is its greatest asset — there is a theatrical quality to how he shapes each phrase, moving between restraint and sudden expressiveness in ways that feel genuinely spontaneous. The core feeling is the particular Korean aesthetic of han-meets-nostalgia: a bittersweet recognition that beautiful things are always already in the process of ending. This is the song university students in Seoul play during the last dinner of a semester, when everyone is pretending they aren't saying goodbye. It belongs to the neo-retro movement Jannabi helped revive, and it rewards listeners who sit with it across all four of its emotional seasons.