Peggy Gou’s debut album finds the superstar Korean DJ delivering 10 tracks of throwback 1990s dance music that, while dispatched with a lot of creativity and joy, struggles sometimes to find a point of difference. It is a record that begins to carve out its own sound, but which doesn’t always hang together as well as it should.
It features (It Goes Like) Nanana — originally released last year — which is comfortably Gou’s biggest hit and the centrepiece of her sound. The track samples (9PM) Till I Come by ATB, one of the biggest dance hits of the ‘90s, and is adorned by simple, elegant production and an airy vocal. It’s a lightweight chemical banger.
This sound scans well on tracks like Back to One, which employs similarly delicious retro keyboard patches and squelchy drum loops, alongside Korean-English lyrics that sparkle and trot.
There is also the album closer 1+1=11, which is faster and thus more hard house adjacent. This is more intense, guttural music of the sort that one might expect at Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, where Gou was a sensation. But it oddly ends up being a slightly limp outro — it doesn't really have much emotional or spiritual heft.
And this disconnect can be traced back through the album. When you listen a third or fourth time, certain tracks that seemed really bold and impressive begin to seem a bit silly and naff. First among them is I Believe in Love Again, a slower dance-pop track featuring Lenny Kravitz’s falsetto. It starts well and then arrives at a chorus so generic and tedious that it makes you question the melodies found elsewhere.
The same goes for the opener Your Art, a slow burn builder that features a spoken word skit/poem from Gou: “We have colonised, industrialised, modernised / We have forgotten self respect and to listen to ourself [...] create your universe anew.” As the opening to a live DJ set you can just imagine the smoke machines, lights and swell of the crowd, but as the opening to an album it seems dumb and frivolous — it makes you think of turbo capitalism and Fyre Festival.
But let's not be too sniffy. This is still a debut, and there is a lot to like, but ‘I Hear You’ is disjointed and random. You get this frequently with DJ-producers — Calvin Harris has tried to make a feature of it by naming his albums ‘Funk Wav Bounces’ — which covers for the inconsistency somewhat. This is good fun but it doesn’t quite succeed in moving the live show to an album format.
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