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<\/p>\nTranslation result<\/p>\n
015B, made up of producer Jeong Seok-won and guitarist Jang Ho-il (a pseudonym used by Jeong Ki-won, Seok-won’s older brother, to keep his musical activities concealed from his employer), broadened the palette of Korean pop in the 1990s. They were the country\u2019s first producer band to build songs around guest vocalists rather than a permanent lead singer. Seen against today\u2019s highly specialized pop industry, their method was nothing short of pioneering.<\/p>\n
They moved fluidly across genres, often twisting and recombining styles until their work felt like a laboratory experiment. Yet they kept delivering hit songs with steady frequency. Notable titles include “Now, Goodbye,” “Very Old Lovers,” “Essays and Cars,” “Love of the New Humans,” “Sad Fate” (originally by Nami), and “Short Hair” (originally by Cho Yong-pil).<\/p>\n
\u25c6 South Korea’s first producer band<\/p>\n
The brothers, who hail from Daegu and studied at Seoul National University, joined the later lineup of Muhangeodo\u2014the band that won the grand prize at the 1988 MBC College Song Festival with “To You.” Jeong Seok-won joined first as a keyboardist; Jang Ho-il followed on guitar. Muhangeodo released one album and then dissolved. Its leader, Shin Hae-chul, went on to solo work and formed N.EX.T, while Jeong Seok-won, Jang Ho-il, and Jo Hyeong-gon (who later left) founded 015B.<\/p>\n
There are several theories about the meaning of 015B. Some see a wordplay on Muhangeodo\u20140 = mu (nothing), 1 = han (one), and 5B sounding like “orbit.” Jang Ho-il has said the name also came from Jo Hyeong-gon\u2019s online handle (01orbit). Officially, the band explains it with the Chinese characters \u7a7a\u4e00\u70cf\u98db, literally “one crow flies in the sky.”<\/p>\n
015B debuted with their first album in 1990 and disbanded after releasing their sixth album in 1996. They returned with a seventh album in 2006, and since 2018 they have been releasing one new song online each month.<\/p>\n
Critics typically split their seven-year peak in the 1990s into two phases. Albums one through five captured a tender, occasionally sardonic youthful voice. The sixth album, The Sixth Sense, extended that skewed perspective into a collaborative construction\u2014songwriters and sound engineers together forged a late-century vision filled with cynicism and a kind of fevered intensity.<\/p>\n
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\u25c6 This year marks the 30th anniversary of a ‘dystopian’ masterpiece<\/p>\n
Critical opinion tends to favor the sixth album. It represents the peak of the band\u2019s accumulated experience and reads like a final creative blaze before their breakup\u2014some listeners detect an artistic awakening in its textures and themes. The album turns 30 on May 23.<\/p>\n
015B\u2019s signature use of guest vocalists is especially striking on this record. Longtime collaborators assembled here include singer-songwriter and outstanding choral session singer Jo Kyu-chan\u2014whose chorus on the instrumental “The Virgin’s Tears” is regarded as a landmark in Korean pop\u2014alongside Kim Hyung-joong, Lee Seung-hwan, Shin Kyung-pil (a pseudonym used by Yoon Jong-shin due to agency issues), Lee Jang-woo, and MGR (Park Yong-chan).<\/p>\n
Outside the band’s more youthful offerings like “Thank You,” “My Old Friend,” and “Bean Pod,” almost every track on the record is provocative. The title track “Dictator” and songs such as “Corner Store Girl,” “21st Century Monolith,” “Decayed City,” “Descendants of Mars,” “Air Borne,” and “Nuclear Age” draw on industrial and techno electronic vocabularies to conjure a dark, bleak, and hopeless dystopia.<\/p>\n
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\u25c6 A classic of ‘end-of-century’ pop<\/p>\n
On the song “Humans Are Humans,” the band treated the mainstreaming internet and the dangers of indiscriminate information spread as a facet of dystopia. Lyrics such as “Do you believe that a mass of metal more human than humans will bring a new era? The media is turning networks into superstars for no reason” feel eerily forward-looking about the 21st century.<\/p>\n
This January, 015B released a remake of “Humans Are Humans” and revised the lyrics to: “Do you believe a talking machine, more human than humans, will bring a new era? People follow intelligent networks like children, without questioning forward or back.” The update reframes the song to address artificial intelligence and the blind faith people place in it from a dystopian vantage point.<\/p>\n
For the remake\u2019s guest vocal, they used an AI voice rather than a human singer\u2014an intentional irony. That choice made the song a rare pop-music example that, over the span of thirty years, repeatedly engages with the era\u2019s pressing debates.<\/p>\n
Moments that channel end-of-century anxiety into music\u2014moments that capture social confusion and collective unease\u2014are unlikely to return for decades, perhaps not until just before the 2100s. Until then, this album will likely be revered as a classic embodiment of late-century feeling.<\/p>\n
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015B, formed by producer Jung Seok-won and guitarist Jang Ho-il, expanded the spectrum of 1990s Korean pop music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/cdn-union.tenbizt.com\/contents\/crawler-dev\/thumbnail\/2026\/05\/CP-2023-0263\/thumb-fbee4592-6cbf-465e-8b87-ea9493d2bf0f.jpg","footnotes":""},"categories":[278101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"yoast_head":"\n