I Hear You

Has any DJ played the game quite like Peggy Gou? Plenty of DJs are influencers, but it’s rare they have a catalog of stylish deep house 12"s to their name. Some are fashion models, but have they been on multiple covers of Vogue, Dazed, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar? There’s always that one percent of superstar DJs bopping between Vegas, Ibiza, and Dubai on their private jets—but only one of them is a 32-year-old Korean woman who insists on managing herself.

Gou has gone from zero to 500 mph in the years since she swapped a fashion career for dance music, ticking off every conceivable goal for a rising celebrity DJ: the first Korean woman to play Berghain, headline sets at Ibiza’s superclubs, a crossover hit on a cool indie, a clothing line backed by Virgil Abloh, a Kylie Minogue remix to promote three new flavors of Magnum ice cream. Most impressively, last year she released “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” a frothy ’90s house bagatelle that went to No. 1 in five countries and has been streamed nearly 500 million times. This is not the sort of thing that happens to DJs, unless their name is Diplo, David Guetta, or Calvin Harris.

Now, eight years after her first single, she releases her debut album on XL Recordings, home to big-league dance acts from the Prodigy to Overmono. Drawing heavily on the ’90s club music that Gou says “changed her taste” during lockdown, I Hear You operates in the same mode of retro fantasia that generated “Nanana,” cherry-picking iconic sounds from house music’s ’80s and ’90s heyday. In rough historical order, we’ve got glassy Italo synths, super-sized syndrums, pumping organs, plasticky MIDI horns, the fierce thwack of the TR-909, several saggy breakbeats, and one tasty jungle loop.

Gou is good at stirring up rosy nostalgia for some long-lost Disco Europa, a mood that strikes a chord with a generation longing for the imagined freedom and optimism of dance music’s golden era. Her breakout tracks—2018’s “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” and “Han Jan”—were defined by their space, restraint, and melody. What they lacked in over-ratcheted builds and drops they made up for in cosmic detailing: bongos, twinkling bells, aquatic basslines, and a uniquely dreamy femininity imparted by Gou’s faux-naive speak-singing in a mixture of Korean and English. I Hear You strikes a frustrating standoff between these two versions of Gou: It lacks the authentic quirkiness of those earlier hits, yet never lets loose the confetti cannons and fishbowl cocktails promised by “Nanana.”

That song is a perfect Frankenstein of familiar club moments: Korg M1 organs, the pitch-bent lick from ATB’s “9 PM (Till I Come),” a polyglottal chorus a lot like A Touch of Class’ Eurohouse hit “Around the World.” What else to say about this neatly welded banger? It’s simply too effective to care what you think of it. It would also be remarkable for Gou to pull off the trick a second time on the same album. “Back to One” is a fun attempt, packed with pumping organs and tacky brass, but the vocals don’t take off and her fake laughter suggests the opposite of carefree euphoria. “1+1=11” is plastic Balearica, mixing a sparkly synth-guitar line with a breakbeat here, an acid wiggle there. “Lobster Telephone” plays to Gou’s strengths with its flamboyant ’80s touches, and might even be a sly dig at Western fans’ noncomprehension of her Korean-language vocals: The lyrics are apparently surreal nonsense (hence the Dalí-referencing title), which makes the meaning equally foreign to everyone.

The rest, to borrow an idea from a house classic, is a land of confusion. There are two collaborations (duets, in fact): one with an internationally recognized pastiche-rock god who just turned 60, the other with a trans rapper from Puerto Rico known for a 2023 collaboration with Latin Grammy-winning producer Bizarrap. What connects Lenny Kravitz and Villano Antillano? Well, they’re both on this album. “I Believe in Love Again” is as syrupy and sincere as its title suggests, grooving along at a radio-friendly tempo. The chorus has a vacant, Random Access Memories disco slinkiness, but Kravitz’s smug squeal is such a powerful turnoff I’ve since been using it as a contraceptive—and I actually like the guy. Meanwhile “All That,” showcasing Antillano’s Spanish-language raps over a slowed-down “Think” break, could have been a spritz of campy mystery and romance, but instead feels like an earnest slog.

In the filler zone of tracks seven to nine, Gou doubles down on her signature moves, adding bigger builds and acid-burst drops (“I Go”) and following Moby’s formula for melancholy exotica (“Purple Horizon”). “Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)” is much more likable, juxtaposing a folkish melody on Korean gayageum (probably played by Gou herself) with salsa horns and a jungle loop intelligent enough for LTJ Bukem. But the East-West fusion doesn’t go further than that—it’s no “Sumo Jungle Grandeur,” for example—and the experiment is dropped after two and a half minutes.

But whatever! It’s a ’90s-inspired dance album, we’re here to have fun and down a few piña coladas, are we not? If only Gou had the same idea. The problem really starts with the opening track. “Your Art” is a portentous introduction, with Italo storm clouds gathering under a spoken-word salad of Instagram affirmations and vague political soundbites. “Create your universe anew… be present,” she says hypnotically. “Look up, look down… what do you see?” These words are adapted from a poem by Olafur Eliasson, an artist and eco-activist once known for installing an artificial sun in London’s Tate Modern; he also designed the strange mirrored headpiece Gou wears on the album cover.

“We have colonized, industrialized, modernized,” she continues, improbably. “We have forgotten self-respect, and to listen to ourselves.” This is a planetary-scale reach for an artist who, for one thing, must be among the music industry’s biggest carbon emitters (did nobody inform Eliasson?). And unless there are some revolutionary slogans hidden in the mix, nothing on I Hear You engages with art or politics or nature in any graspable way.

By prefacing her debut with this meaningless own goal, Gou undermines her brand as global party girl in chief and reminds us of everything we’d rather forget while we’re on our fizzy beach holiday: the poisonous waste produced by the fashion industry, the lethal emissions generated by the private jets and luxury cars she likes, the murderous regimes that use electronic music festivals to culture-wash their reputations. The “leave politics out of music” brigade might be annoyed that any of this is even mentioned in conjunction with their fave, but look—she started it.

Gou is blessed with talent; she writes, produces, mixes, plays her own instruments, is an exceptional DJ; she’s born to win. As her Billboard interviewer recently noted, she has “a business acumen that could be characterized as corporate hustle if it didn’t also happen inside dark techno clubs.” There’s no point in throwing around grand concepts like so much glitter in order to feel like a serious album artist—just turn up the “nananas” and keep the piña coladas coming.

Peggy Gou: I Hear You

$28 at Rough Trade

$28 $24 at Amazon