FOLLOWING A UK TOUR IN 2019, BURSTERS RETURNED WITH A FULL ALBUM 'ONCE AND FOR ALL' JUST AS THE WORLD LOCKED DOWN IN MARCH.
YOU CHOSE TO FUSE A MORE HARDCORE MUSIC STYLE WITH POPULAR STYLES AND SOUNDS - WHAT INFLUENCED THIS?
'Once and For All' merges alternative and popular sounds, takes a strong stance on social and moral issues and offers a left of field listen to Kpop fans open to a heavier sound.
DAEGUN: It was a very natural development. We definitely didn’t intentionally add pop elements to our music to follow the mainstream sound. Our band members, including me, like to listen to a huge range of genres including pop. And we’re a band that never ties itself down to one genre, but constantly combines various ones when we create new music. So that’s why the sound naturally comes out that way, I think. For example, I actually didn’t like rock music at the start. I originally liked ballad and pop. But Junyong and Gyejin, whom I was friends with in middle school, recommended Linkin Park to me and that’s how I got into rock. Similarly, our members typically listen to very different assortments of genres, get influenced by them, and want to incorporate them into our own music. We express ourselves with the influences we get from other music and our own lives, so it’s natural that BURSTERS has quite a wide range of music styles.
UnitedKpop spoke to the rock band about their latest album. YOUR ALBUM ‘ONCE AND FOR ALL’ COMBINES A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT SOUNDS - HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR MUSIC? HWANHEE: There is no fixed ‘BURSTERS’ sound’ because we define our sound as ‘constantly changing and combining various elements in new ways’. So I think getting out of whatever our current pre-existing sound is and going for the next new territory will be a never-ending task for us. Just as our new album contains a lot of new attempts that distinguishes it from previous albums, we will keep striving to come back with a ‘new BURSTERS’ in every album to come. BURSTERS is one band, but the five members really differ from each other in terms of the music and message that each pursues. Since such an eclectic set of members are all involved in the composing and lyrics writing, the unique colour of each member end up showing through in the final product, and a separate, new colour of ‘BURSTERS’ also gets created.
FILM AND LITERATURE TRANSLATORS OFTEN DISCUSS THE CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATING SOME KOREAN IDEAS INTO ENGLISH. DID YOU FACE ANY CHALLENGES WITH LYRICS YOU FELT DIDN’T TRANSLATE WELL? DAEGUN: We worked hard to not lose or twist any nuances one would get in Korean. Actually, a different language is not just a different communication system but entirely different sensibility and culture, you know? So we never stopped contemplating and working on this. Making an English album was really worth it though, a worthy challenge.
