Start with the admission, because the label does: Onyx is an AI artist. Words, arrangements, mixing decisions and creative direction are human; the voice and the visuals are generated. Novaix stamps this on every release, and the honesty clears the air. Nobody is being fooled, so the question becomes whether the music is any good. On *CLOSE*, it is better than good. It is the most coherent debut statement from a synthetic performer so far, and it would be a sharp record whatever its provenance.

Britpop was always an act of imagination before it was an act of geography. Damon Albarn never lived in a Cockney music-hall song, Jarvis Cocker watched the English from the edge of the party, and half of Oasis's mythology was built from a Manchester that sounded bigger on record than it was in life. So it makes a certain sense that one of the warmest tributes to the genre in years arrives from Seoul, from a bedroom-scale operation whose maker goes by appetiteapple and credits no one else because no one else was in the room.

There's a particular pleasure in being lied to well, and HANGAWI (formerly SYLVIA M) has built a career on exactly that pleasure. "NPD" arrives like a love letter written in someone else's blood, and it takes a good ninety seconds before you notice whose blood it actually is.

Debut singles tend to arrive one of two ways: cautious, hedged, terrified of committing to a single idea, or naked and unguarded, betting everything on a feeling the artist hasn't yet learned to distrust. HANGAWI, the South Korean singer-songwriter formerly recording as Silvia M, has chosen the second path with "Anyway," and the gamble largely pays off.

Jung Jaemin does not arrive asking for your attention. He is not the kind of artist who announces himself with the anxious percussion of someone desperate to be heard above the noise. Instead, he opens a window — facing east, into a Seoul morning that has already turned grey before the light has finished deciding what it wants to be — and simply lets you stand there beside him. Whether you stay is, apparently, entirely up to you.

Seoul's most restlessly cerebral duo have done something quietly radical. At a moment when the music industry is falling over itself to genuflect at the altar of algorithmic efficiency, moonsomoon have retreated — defiantly, deliberately — into the warm, imprecise chambers of the analogue world, and emerged with an album that feels less like a record and more like an act of civil disobedience.

Senior Dunce's latest offering arrives like a revelation wrapped in the familiar garb of funky house—a genre that has rarely seemed so charged with existential purpose. "Bestial," his follow-up to "City Centre," presents itself as dance music, yet beneath its infectious groove lurks something far more substantial: a manifesto on self-acceptance delivered through the medium of four-to-the-floor euphoria.

QRIAN is a South Korean artist who demonstrates her kind of unique creativity filled with life itself. Her new EP 'BOSS' came out 4 years after the debut release and consists of the single 'BOSS' and its three remixes.

Richie Madewell is known in South Korea and abroad as a talented singer-songwriter. Originally from Indiana, USA, he released his debut album in 2018 while in Seoul and was a frequent guest on the local indie rock scene.