Sailor Honeymoon – I Wanna Leave You
Sailor Honeymoon are back with “I Wanna Leave You”, the lead single from their debut album The Worst Of Sailor Honeymoon, out August 14 on their own Good Good Records via PIAS. The Seoul trio, Abi Raymaker on drums and vocals, Zaeeun Shin on guitar and vocals, Yelim Kim on bass, came out of the city’s DIY scene and this track is a tight, crackling shot of what they do: two minutes of scrappy punk.
The song’s little structural trick is the best part. It fakes its ending around the ninety-second mark, drops to just hi-hat and a few loose guitar chords, then swings back into the verse and chorus one more time. That kind of playful, why-not economy runs through everything they do. For a band that formed almost by accident out of informal jam sessions, swapping instruments with no expectations, there’s a looseness here that never feels careless.
The album will have thirteen tracks, produced by Luke Smith (Foals, Depeche Mode), mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer (Parquet Courts, Temples) and mastered by Katie Tavini, so the DIY spirit comes with real polish behind it. Raymaker has framed the whole record as a push against the flawless, tightly controlled image a lot of Korean cultural exports are held to: they wanted to make something that felt human instead. On the evidence of “I Wanna Leave You”, that instinct is exactly what makes it land.
