Ham Bo-young started out as a pop singer, the kind trained to hit a clean note and hold it. Somewhere along the way she switched to minyo, the ornamented, weathered style of Korean folk singing that bends and cracks a note rather than holding it still. That switch, more than any instrumentation, is what makes Coreyah sound like nobody else fronting a gugak-rock band right now.
The Seoul six-piece formed in 2010, and Clap&Applause, released on 20 July 2020 to mark the group's tenth anniversary, is their fourth album and the clearest statement yet of what a decade of touring has done to their sound. Earlier records leaned on slow builds and Balkan-tinted arrangements; this one is built for a room that wants to move. Traditional rhythmic cycles, the kind that refuse to resolve into a straightforward four beats, get pushed toward something closer to a dancefloor pulse without losing their asymmetry. A month earlier, the band had recorded a Tiny Desk Home Concert for NPR from lockdown, playing to a camera instead of the crowds they had built across more than thirty countries.
Kim Dong-kun's daegum, the bamboo transverse flute with a buzzing membrane that gives Korean court and folk music its distinctive rasp, carries most of the album's hooks. On 'Big Things' it is bright to the point of exuberance, doubling as both lead instrument and percussion.
Elsewhere the record gets bluesier. On 'Till the Dawn', Na Sun-jin's geomungo, the six-string zither played with a short stick, takes long, gritty solo passages that owe less to court music than to a guitarist working a pentatonic scale, phrased with the same physical urgency.
'Yellow Flower' brings in Samuel Seo, a fixture of Korea's English-language singer-songwriter scene, for a feature that softens the album's edges without diluting them. The rest of the tracklist, from the percussive title cut 'Baksusori' to the closing 'Good Dreams', keeps circling the same idea: traditional instruments are not props for a folk-revival aesthetic but functioning lead voices in a rock band.
That distinction is what separated Coreyah from the wave of gugak crossover acts that followed them. Where some groups treat the daegum or geomungo as texture, a bit of local colour laid over an otherwise conventional arrangement, Coreyah write around what the instruments can actually do rhythmically, which is why the results sound closer to Balkan brass bands or West African guitar music than to anything filed under world fusion for its own sake. A decade in, that instinct has only sharpened.
