Drinking Boys And Girls Choir's Surging K-Punk Will Keep You Raging In 2019

If 2018 was the year K-pop finally breached the gates of the U.S. Mainstream, the South Korean power trio Drinking Males and Women Choir are helping light a similar fire for K-punk this year. The skate-infused rock tonic swirled up by the band's three members — MJ, Meena, and Bondu — is grittier and spunkier than the cautiously choreographed movements of BTS; stylistically, DBGC hew more closely to American pop-punk institutions of Blink-182 and Sum 41 (and in their numerous songwriters and singers, even the legendary Minutemen). This all makes their upcoming LP, Keep Drinking, a rather potent melange where gilded hooks and noisy hardcore mingle with brief ska excursions and more. Yet it all began with a shared affinity for New Noticed Glory.


Based in Daegu, 150 miles southeast of Seoul, the trio started playing with each other by covering one of the Florida five-piece's seminal hits. "I told them, I'd like to cover this song," MJ told MTV News recently in a Skype interview. She doesn't remember which one, though. Meena recalls a more ambitious approach: "Actually, we tried the entire album. Although we just finished the one song."


"And then we began making [our own] songs," MJ said.


Meena and MJ started as drummers, and Meena hopped on bass as Bondu joined on guitar. They all take turns singing in both Korean and English, and each gets at least one spotlit moment on Keep Drinking (out March 8 on Damnably). The album's a caffeinated 18-song liftoff front-loaded with a rallying title track, a blistering assault called "I'm a Fucking McDonald's" inspired by Meena's day job, and the mosh-ready "National Police Shit." You could visualize the band's collective energy in that song's colorful, joyously juvenile music video, which MTV News is exclusively premiering above.


That the clip plays like a stunty Vine compilation without all of the filler might explain the album's wild mania. While MJ gets the album's sweetest moment, anchoring a breezy cowpunk number with a forlorn lilt, Meena and Bondu trade off vintage millennial pop-punk shouts while in the rest, all reminiscent of the North American skate-infused rock the musical group grew up downloading. Right now, DBGC are the ones online; in one of their best and most revelatory live clips, they charge through "Song of Sincerity" to an audience of 30 or 40 jumping fans in a little club. Bondu and Meena jump, also, as they strum their first chords. The audience goes off.


"Here, it's just one live club," Meena mentioned. "If we [organize] a punk show, we call another city's punk musical group, and so they come to Daegu and we play with each other. Korea is really small, so it's maybe four hours by bus. If they take a speed train, they can come in one hour and also a half."


DBGC are loyal to Daegu. They don't visualize a need to relocate to a bigger city like Seoul for the exposure. It's also expensive, for one thing — ranked the sixth-priciest city in the world in 2018 — and geographically, it's close enough that they can get there in a couple of hours anyway. "We can go to Seoul and come back the same day," Meena mentioned. "We've had several shows in Seoul."


There's also the world wide web, the very tool that permits music fans a hemisphere away to discover, dig, and share DBGC (and their incredibly endearing, mildly rebellious YouTube videos) in the opening place. Nevertheless behind that, Meena, MJ, and Bondu have hometown loyalty, even in a city with a "really small" punk scene. In Daegu, they sustain that culture by organizing shows and playing live throughout the local Go Skateboarding Day festivities. "Daegu is a conservative city," MJ mentioned. Several governments banned skateboarding in public. So we have to crash on that."


One scene they have although to crash is America. Nevertheless that's changing soon, thanks to an upcoming midnight SXSW gig, their first-ever in the U.S. They are a tad nervous. They've only seen the festival as it's represented in films about music. Obviously, the delight is there, also. "I'm really happy, although I can't imagine," Meena mentioned. "We just practice with each other and make a playlist. A friend from America, from California, as soon as we reported our band's name on the SXSW site, he was really happy and really excited and he notified me, 'Wow, you are awesome.' So I can feel good."


Even as SXSW's coolness has gradually rubbed off like a nightclub wrist stamp — so it's been suggested for years — the festival's atmosphere might be a welcome vibe for DBGC, who've had some bad luck playing shows outdoor Daegu. Once, immediately after a good gig" in Indonesia, local police locked down the venue for two hours in pursuit of an alleged marijuana smoker. Plus couple of a day or two later, true to their musical group name, the trio was shut off by the police for having a number of beers while playing a public space. (They rebounded with a private show indoors a studio, thanks to their pals in Bandung's Saturday Night Karaoke.)


several live hiccups are key in forming a band's origin story. DBGC seem far less concerned with myth-making, though. They're also focused on the people singing their songs back to them and riding the high of that moment — whether it's one giant leap for K-punk or just the hugest adventure nevertheless for one excited musical group — to care. "I work a full-time job, so any time While I play a show, I feel free," Meena mentioned. "If anybody listens to my song, and I can play, I'm just really happy."