Ten tracks, forty minutes, three languages. I Hear You moves between Korean, English and Spanish, and Peggy Gou produced all of it herself. Exclaim called the result a masterful first full dose of her kaleidoscopic K-house, which is as good a name for it as anyone has managed.
XL Recordings released it on 7 June 2024. Lenny Kravitz sings on I Believe in Love Again. Villano Antillano features on All That. The opening track, Your Art, carries creative direction and a poem from the artist Olafur Eliasson.
The Guest List Is the Statement
Those three names do not belong to the same world. Kravitz is a rock musician of a previous generation, Villano Antillano is a Puerto Rican rapper working in Spanish, and Eliasson is an installation artist best known for putting a sun inside Tate Modern.
Assembling them on a house album from a Korean producer based in Berlin is a specific argument about where dance music sits now, and the trilingual delivery makes the same point without needing to be explained. Nothing on the record is presented as a crossover; it simply proceeds as though the categories were never there.
Nanana Did the Work
The album exists because of a single. (It Goes Like) Nanana came out in June 2023, built on a sample of ATB’s 1998 trance record 9 PM (Till I Come), and went to number one in the Netherlands and in Flanders, five in the UK, thirty-three on the Global 200 and five on the US dance chart.
It is platinum in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Australia, twice platinum in Italy and gold in the United States. The breakthrough came through festival footage from the Lost Nomads event in Marrakesh circulating on social media, which is now the standard mechanism and was then still novel.
Resident Advisor’s Henry Ivry described it as full-on Café del Mar worship with vintage rave chords and a forlorn synth carrying shades of Eurodance, adding that the lyrics are a bit silly but catchy, and that this is dance pop down to a science. Gou’s own account is simpler: a feeling everyone knows but struggles to name, the warmth and excitement of being surrounded by friends.
Harper’s Bazaar to Berghain
Kim Min-ji was born in Incheon in 1991 and started classical piano at eight. At fourteen her parents sent her to London to study English. She went home at eighteen, then returned six months later to study at the London College of Fashion, and after graduating worked as London correspondent editor for Harper’s Bazaar Korea before moving to Berlin.
A friend from Korea taught her to DJ in 2009. Her first booking was at Cirque Le Soir in Soho, followed by a weekly night at The Book Club in East London. She learned Ableton Live in 2013 and finished her first track, Hungboo, in 2014.
She became the first Korean DJ to play Berghain, made her Boiler Room debut in New York in 2017, and has since played Coachella, Glastonbury, Primavera Sound and Sónar. The route from a fashion magazine desk to that particular room is not one anybody plans.
The Sample Was a Trance Record
It is worth pausing on what Nanana is built from. ATB’s 9 PM (Till I Come) was a 1998 trance single, one of the defining European club records of its year and, by the 2010s, exactly the kind of thing the underground had decided to be embarrassed about.
Sampling it in 2023 was therefore a small act of nerve. Trance spent two decades as the least fashionable branch of dance music, and a producer with credibility in Berlin had a great deal to lose by leaning on it. That the result went platinum in six territories suggests the embarrassment was always institutional rather than shared by listeners.
The wider pattern is now clear across the genre: producers raised on late-nineties European dance have stopped treating it as a guilty inheritance. Gou was simply early, and picked the most conspicuous possible record to prove the point with.
Two Labels of Her Own
Her recording debut came in January 2016 on Rekids with The Art of War Part 1, followed by Seek for Maktoop, which contained It Makes You Forget (Itgehane), then Once in 2018, her first vocal record, and Moment in April 2019.
In March 2019 she launched Gudu Records, gudu meaning shoes in Korean, with the stated aim of giving artists starting out better opportunities and treatment than she had received. A month earlier she had launched a fashion label called KIRIN, giraffe in Korean, backed by Virgil Abloh through New Guards Group.
Running a record label to correct how new artists are treated is the same instinct that produced Nina Kraviz founding трип, and the two also share a starting point: both made their recording debut on Rekids. What separates them is that Gou built a clothing line at the same time, treating the two as one practice rather than as a musician with a side project.
What the Album Actually Does
The sequencing is unusually varied for a dance record. Your Art opens at under two minutes. Back to One, I Go and 1+1=11 all pass five. Seoulsi Peggygou runs two and a half minutes and puts her home city in the title. The edit of Nanana sits fifth, in the middle, rather than being used to open.
Burying the hit is a real decision. Most debut albums built around a platinum single lead with it; placing it halfway through says the record is meant to be heard as a sequence.
A Divided Response
Metacritic settled at 73, which conceals an unusually wide spread. The Line of Best Fit gave nine out of ten and Exclaim eight; Stereogum made it album of the week and called it short, sharp and punchy. Pitchfork gave 6.2 and NME three out of five, the latter allowing that when it works it is like finding dance music for the first time.
That range is what a pop-facing dance album usually attracts. It reached thirty-nine on the UK Albums Chart but three on UK Dance and two on UK Independent, plus fourteen on US Top Dance Albums and five in Australia.
The pattern describes exactly what the record is: a club producer’s album that broke into the mainstream through one song, and which the specialist charts rated far higher than the general one. Three languages and an installation artist on track one were never going to produce anything else.
What the split reviews mostly measure is a disagreement about what a dance album is for. Judged as a set of club tools it is thin, because half of it is too short and too sung to work on a floor. Judged as a pop record made by somebody who DJs, it is unusually adventurous, and the writers who scored it highest were the ones reviewing the second thing.
Eight years separated her first EP from her first album, which is a long apprenticeship by any standard and an extremely long one for an artist whose breakthrough single arrived on social media. She had the audience for a debut album several years before she made one.
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