Say Sue Me

Say Sue Me, the indie pop outfit from South Korea, blend the thick, reverberant guitars of shoegaze with dream pop’s delicate melodic lines, further enriching the mix through surf-style twang and the harmonic shifts typical of 1960s pop. Early releases maintained an airy, buoyant character, yet the sudden misfortune that befell their much-admired drummer imparted a more reflective quality to later efforts, among them the 2018 album Where We Were Together. That record earned the group international recognition, while The Last Thing Left, issued in 2022 after their former colleague’s death, skillfully juxtaposed bright, upbeat numbers against somber reflections on companionship and grief.

The musicians came together in Busan in 2012. Bassist Jae Young and guitarist Kim Byungkyu, friends since fifth grade, first encountered drummer Kang Semin during high school. The three had already performed together in several groups when, that same year, they met Sumi Choi inside a tea shop; drawn to the timbre of her speaking voice, they asked her to become lead vocalist. Their debut album, We’ve Sobered Up, appeared on the Korean imprint Electric Muse in 2013, which also issued the follow-up EP Big Summer Night the next year. After Semin sustained a grave injury in 2016 that left him in a semi-comatose condition, the band, its label, and supporters collected more than £11,000 toward his medical expenses. While he continued recuperating, Say Sue Me began an association with the British independent label Damnably, home to Shonen Knife and Wussy; the label issued a 2017 Record Store Day EP created as a tribute to Semin. Casey McKeever, a friend of Semin’s, supplied drums on the two new tracks “But I Like You” and “I Just Wanna Dance.” The group subsequently recruited Chan Won, whom they discovered online, to handle drumming duties during Semin’s recovery. Later that year Damnably released a self-titled CD compiling the band’s first album and EP, followed by the split 7-inch “For Some Good Reason” alongside the Japanese punk-rock quartet Otoboke Beaver. The musicians then prepared a new album that tempered indie-pop lightness with dream-pop guitars, drawing on five songs written before the accident and numerous others written about their still-recovering friend; Damnably put out Where We Were Together in 2018. The album achieved considerable success at home and received multiple nominations at the 2019 Korean Music Awards, where it secured prizes for Best Modern Rock Album and Best Modern Rock Song for the track “Old Town.”

Behind that release the band toured internationally with drummer Sungwan Lim; at the close of 2019 came the devastating announcement that Semin had died. The loss, compounded by the worldwide pandemic and its hardships, shaped the 2022 album The Last Thing Left. Recorded with the addition of bassist Jaeyoung Kim, the record presents assured dream-pop settings for material addressing loss, fear, and sorrow, yet still reserves room for a measure of optimism, including the buoyant “George & Janice,” written to mark the marriage of the label heads.