Has any DJ played the game like Peggy Gou? Many DJs are influencers, but it is rare that they have a catalog of stylish deep house 12″ to their name. Some are fashion models, but have appeared on many covers Fashion, Dizzy, Ellaand Harper's Bazaar? There's always that one percent of superstar DJs who jet between Vegas, Ibiza and Dubai on their private jets — but only one of them is a 32-year-old Korean woman who insists on managing herself.
Gou has gone from zero to 500 mph in the years since she swapped a fashion career for dance music, hitting every possible goal for an up-and-coming celebrity DJ: the first Korean woman to play Berghain, headlining Ibiza superclubs, a crossover hit a cool indie, a clothing line backed by Virgil Abloh, a Remix by Kylie Minogue to promote three new flavors of Magnum ice cream. Most impressively, last year saw the release of “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” a bubbly '90s bagatelle that hit No. 1 in five countries and has been streamed nearly 500 million times. This is not the case with DJs, unless their name is Diplo, David Guetta or Calvin Harris.
Now, eight years after her first single, she's releasing her debut album on XL Recordings, home to dance tracks from Prodigy to Overmono. Drawing heavily on the 90s club music that Gou tour-billboard-cover-story-1235664758/”>says “Her taste changed” during the lockdown, I hear you it works in the same retro-fantasy way that “Nanana” created, cherry-picking iconic sounds from the heyday of '80s and '90s house music. In roughly historical order, we've got glassy Italo synths, oversized synths, pumping instruments, plastic MIDI horns, the ferocious thump of the TR-909, lots of laid-back breakbeats, and a tasty jungle loop.
Gou is good at evoking rosy nostalgia for some long-lost Disco Europa, a mood that strikes a chord with a generation longing for the imagined freedom and optimism of dance music's golden age. Her breakthrough tracks—2018's “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” and “Han Jan”—were defined by their space, restraint and melody. What they lacked in over-the-top builds and drips they made up for with worldly details: bongos, flashing bells, aquatic bass lines, and a uniquely dreamy femininity imparted by Gou's faux naïve talky singing in a mix of Korean and English. I hear you creates a frustrating juxtaposition between these two versions of Gou: It lacks the original quirkiness of those earlier hits, but never lets loose on the confetti cannons and fish cocktails that “Nanana” promised.
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peggy-gou-i-hear-you