SILICA GEL - Ballad Of You

Hailing from Ansan, a coastal city within the Seoul metropolitan area, Silica Gel (실리카겔) are one of the most celebrated South Korean bands from 2015 to today, having picked up no fewer than six Korean Music Awards. The band, originally a sextet, has since narrowed down to Kim Han-Joo (김한주; vocals and keyboards), Kim Min-su (김민수; guitar and backing vocals), Kim Geon-jay (김건재; drums) and Choi Woong-hee (최웅희; bass).

The band's self-titled 2016 debut album offered a particularly intricate brand of indie rock, caught between dream-pop stasis, noise outbursts, hypnotic loops, hypnagogic pop effects and sci-fi atmospheres, with instrumental embroidery of remarkable quality, though often buried under a wall of arrangements. Despite being preceded by a single as masterful as "Tik Tak Tok" — practically K-prog — the following album, "Power Andre 99" (2023), failed to conjure up as visionary a landscape.
In July 2025 a new single arrived, "NamgungFefere" (a collaboration with Japanese Breakfast), which brought their inspiration back to full strength, weaving together alternative rock, electronic keyboards, surprise shifts in pace and even a few bossa nova nods. Just as surprising was its exclusion from the newly released album, "Ballad Of You", which nonetheless manages to recapture the contaminated, dreamlike attitude of the debut, albeit with some substantial differences: the song structures are more segmented than ever, while the arrangements are less chaotic, even if they still make extensive use of effects and studio trickery.

The tracklist opens with "Dr. Bob", a frantic electropop cut in which the filtered vocal line does little more than chant a nonsensical slogan ("Prevent hair from fall"), with most of the timbral and melodic work left to the synth lines.
"Melatonin 88mg", on the other hand, is a collage of fragments: the first minute and a half rests on a stripped-down, grunge-inspired foundation, with bass, drums and a dry, distorted guitar tone. At 1'39" an instrumental passage kicks in, dominated by synth arpeggios that land somewhere between progressive rock and video-game music. A series of electronic pulses then bridges back to the initial framework, though this time the bass is allowed far showier flourishes than in the first section.
"Crybaby" is an instrumental just over a minute long, where the video-game inspiration comes through even more clearly amid arpeggiators and laser sounds.
"Molecular Gastronomy" moves on a tight, metronomic rhythm for a minute and a half, before the structure starts to crumble: at 1'14" the track keeps the beat but loses intensity, at 1'34" it gives way to an interlude of distorted guitars and synths, once again with a whiff of prog. It lasts about twenty seconds, then the initial rhythm returns, only to be swallowed up almost immediately in a hiccupping coda.
These are songs built on highly catchy, well-defined melodies, yet constantly cut through by digressions and disruptive elements.

After "Manphasickzuck", a midtempo guitar-driven indie rock track laced with electronic arpeggios and vocoder, comes "You Just Wanna Have Fun", a three-minute instrumental piece built from sustained notes and piling electric-organ drones: not exactly what you'd expect to find on an alternative rock record, but then again, the world of Silica Gel has always been enigmatic and ramshackle.
"Crime Scene" runs under two minutes and consists of a series of echoing whispers laid over a soft drum-machine beat.
The choruses that build the refrain of "Metamorphosing" bring a touch of emphasis, for the first time, to a record that up to this point has been nervy and skeletal.
"Postpink" is a post-punk gallop — the pun is intentional — and it's almost startling to hear such a direct, linear track only at number 10 in the tracklist.
On "Up Quark" the delicate vocal line moves exclusively over a synth sequence that even sounds slightly out of tune.
The band's pop instincts — oddities aside, they're also capable of thoroughly memorable melodies — finally burst into full view on "Big Void", the album's lead single, a hybrid of indie rock and post-punk driven by a crystalline piano melody (hardly the signature element of either genre).
Closing things out is "Accident", a choral ballad with piano and saturated guitars, a sort of dystopian take on the grand tradition of Korean ballads that dominated the Eighties-Nineties, also casting a glance toward the West (the timbres, harmonies and pacing distantly recall Electric Light Orchestra).
With this third album, Silica Gel essentially confirm themselves as one of the most fertile creative forces in their home country.

Note: almost all the tracks are sung by Han-joo in English, though his idiosyncratic pronunciation makes the lyrics hard to make out without reading along. The exceptions are "Postpink" (sung by Min-su in English, with much clearer diction), "Up Quark" (sung by Han-joo, partly in English and partly in Korean) and "Accident" (sung by Min-su, the only track entirely in Korean).

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06/09/2026