Her perspective seems to have evolved alongside her sound. While she initially adopted a detached, enigmatic posture (she cites Drain Gang as an early inspiration), these days, she sounds more like a flippant child of pop culture who’s equally fluent in Korean sensibilities and American hip-hop technique. Rapping in Korean on songs like “More Hyper,” she slides into different flows and fills the gaps in kimj’s chiptune barrage with squealed ad-libs that recall Young Thug. Effie sang and rapped largely in English until recently; she told Dazed earlier this year that she finds it challenging to sound fluid in her native tongue due to Korean’s syllabic structure. On these new songs, however, she seems to unlock a previously unseen nimbleness. Now, lines that begin in English sometimes end in Korean and vice versa; she makes stitching different languages and cadences into a single flow sound effortless.
pullup to busan 4 morE hypEr summEr it’s gonna be a fuckin moviE only runs about 13 minutes, but Effie manages to cover an impressive amount of ground in that time. On the rage rap number “2025기침,” she barks her lines one syllable at at time over a crunchy, blown-out beat. She coins a new way to bum a smoke on the wobbly, playful “CAN I SIP 담배,” (which translates to “Can I sip the cigarette?”), punctuating her bars with gasps. “LET’S FIND A GOOD MANAGER” is bouncy and shot through with sunny optimism: hyperpop meets pop-punk. Meanwhile, “thankie thankie,” which closes the EP, is sentimental and bite-sized; its spoken-word vocals sound like a late-night phone call.
The Korean music industry has achieved worldwide domination through brutal efficiency, producing an endless stream of impossibly slick, endlessly digestible pop—the sort of music that PC Music artists were cheekily imagining a decade ago. While Effie and kimj are clearly influenced by both of those camps, their end goal doesn’t seem to be either an imitation or a critique. With these six songs, they present a vision of what Korean pop could become: conversant instead of extractive in its relationship to hip-hop, texturally abrasive, mildly sleazy in the mold of blog house. On pullup to busan, Effie sounds like a 22 year-old having fun with her friends, but also like something more: a prototype for a different kind of global pop star.
