Jeong Sewoon’s Love in the Margins: Nostalgic Indie Rock for the Modern Yearner
Photo: Cam With Us
Korean indie singer-songwriter Jeong Sewoon returns with a five-song groovy EP Love in the Margins. The EP pairs Sewoon’s smooth, characteristic vocal tone with easy-listening beats, from lo-fi to acoustic. The result offers an atmospheric, vivid release that melds the ins and outs of love into five approachable, laid-back indie-rock tracks. Each song features production and lyrics solely created by Jeong Sewoon himself, with him also leading production alongside longtime collaborators and composers in the likes of KWACA (“Orange Blue,” “Love in the Margins,” and “Tell me you love me”) and Chanjin Lee (“Love in the Margins,” and “Is it too late?”), among others.
A blend of synth-laden indie rock, with lyrics drenched in nostalgia, “Love in the Margins” offers soft, pondering emotion: a dreamy title track full of introspection that fondly gazes back on marginal love. It’s framed with accompanying B-sides: opener “Orange Blue” is a vocal-forward, up-tempo indie-rock song that frames the fear of loving with the choice to keep trying. Funk-forward “Tell me you love me” features a strong distorted guitar riff juxtaposed across Sewoon’s clear vocals and progressively layered verses: from a standalone percussion line into a full-fledged echoing chorus, parroting its refrain: “let our love slowly flow too.” “Stupid Love” continues in its steady, guitar-forward rock vein, with a dreamy, hazy outro that breaks up the track's ease. Jeong Sewoon closes the EP with “Is it too late?” a lo-fi minimal song evocative of the emptiness and rain it sings of.
Together, the album is a handcrafted atmospheric indie-rock treat: 14 minutes of tender, dreamy tracks that waft over and under each other in a refreshing, bite-sized exploration of love. In the likes of wave to earth, Ha Hyun Sang, or perhaps Jukjae, Jeong Sewoon carves his own niche in Korean indie-rock day-by-day, and Love in the Margins offers a soft, steady contribution to his catalogue.
TRACKLIST
“Orange Blue”
“Love in the Margins”
“Tell me you love me”
“Stupid Love”
“Is it too late?”