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The music frontman, writer, and producer Stanley Cho crafts as Korean Boyfriend blends gritty overdrive, warm analogue synths, and pretty melodies into something that has been described as “super-interesting” and “genre-bending.” Set in a familiar context of quotidian pop-cultural references and pop music, necessarily tweaked by an outside point of view, the songs on YELLOW touch upon themes related to cultural institutions, fine art, Asian American insecurities, and punk nostalgia.
Korean Boyfriend (aka KBF, KBEEF, K🐝F, K🥩) began as a wannabe K-Pop band but very quickly realized some flaws. The multiplicity of sounds and instrumentation found on YELLOW reflect both nostalgia for lost time and desire for something else. A temporary recording studio was built in a basement in Harlem, to track twelve songs using a mixture of analogue and digital tools. All instrumentation, production, recording, and mixing was done by Cho.
While he may have not set out to make a record that denies genre as a construct, the process of solitude and struggle afforded a freedom of musical and lyrical expression. Cho has crafted a complete work where variation is perceived through repetition, and elements shift in and out, framing melodies that seem like they’ve always existed. It’s pop music in structure, rock music in feel.
All of this is better captured on his new single “Pigeons,” which we are pleased to premiere today!
About the song, Cho comments “This is a song about pigeons fighting for their spot on the ledge of a building, in a big city where people are also vying for their place—apartments, careers, sidewalks, a seat on the subway, an hour on a tennis court, etc. “Pigeons” makes light of everyday conflicts faced in New York, relentless and short-lived alike.”
