W: Rachel June
Who is Silica Gel?
We’re a four-piece band from Seoul: Kim Hanjoo (vocals/synth), Kim Chunchu (vocals/guitar), Choi Woonghee (bass) and Kim Geonjay (drums). We debuted in 2015, with psychedelic rock as the root — but we mix in electronic music, pop and experimental sounds without much prejudice.
We once described our music as ‘Bibimbap Rock’ — four completely different tastes tossed into one bowl, and the mix is what Silica Gel tastes like.
2. For someone yet to discover you, how would you describe your music - and how does Ballad of You capture that?
We’d rather not hand new listeners a genre label. What we’d promise instead is this: music that never goes where you expect it to. We chase interesting sounds first and figure out what to call them later, so a single song may drift from psychedelic rock into electronics, into pop, into something even we don’t have a name for. Ballad of You captures that spirit in its most direct form yet — four people playing together in one room, with only the layers a live ensemble truly needs, so you can hear the exact moments where a familiar sound turns into something unfamiliar. If you’re discovering us through this record, you’re meeting us right as we open up a new musical world — which is honestly the best time to meet us.
3. Ballad of You draws on Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix and a concept you've coined yourselves, "Spiral Molting" - what pulled you toward that idea?
What pulled us in was the beauty of it. Phoenix keeps asking the same question across different eras — that life doesn’t end, it circulates — and what amazes us is that it never explains that difficult theme. It simply renders it beautifully, so it reaches the heart before the head. That felt like the real power of art. To be precise, Phoenix isn’t a storyline the album follows, nor a source we set out from — it’s simply a work in which the ideas we were already circling happen to be expressed beautifully. The idea itself began closer to home: repeating daily life, making music, even finding yourself repeating similar expressions — all of it started to look like one big circulation. ‘Spiral Molting’ is our phrase for the hopeful version of that: shedding a skin like a snake, but instead of circling in place, you rise one level as you turn. It looks like the same Silica Gel returning, but we’re standing at a different height.
4. What is your pre-show routine?
Backstage before every show, the four of us gather in a circle, shoulders and heads pressed together, and promise one another to give that night’s stage everything we have. We may not have as many people as a professional football squad, but the passion we carry onto the stage is every bit a match for theirs. We film this moment at every show and upload it to our official social media — by now it has become a routine our fans genuinely love too.
5. Who inspires you musically and did any of that show up on this record?
The spectrum is wide — between the four of us you’ll find classical, folk, ambient and house, and we take as much from filmmakers like Tarkovsky and David Lynch, or painters like Francis Bacon, as from musicians. On this record, you might catch traces of MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular and Haruomi Hosono’s S·F·X in the way it blends rock, electronics and a certain sci-fi shimmer. Beyond specific records, though, what shapes us most is simply chasing sounds we find interesting and worrying about the label later. Influence, for us, doesn’t care much about genre boundaries.
6. Is there a story behind the band's name?
At some point in a university media-art class we had to pick a team name on the spot, and Geonjay, staring at a silica gel packet that had fallen out of a gum container, shouted: “Name the band in thirty seconds or we all die!” That was the entire process.
.
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7. "Dr. BOB" opens the album sounding like classic Silica Gel before the record shifts elsewhere - was that a deliberate choice?
Completely deliberate. Every new world needs a familiar doorway. We wanted to open the album with the Silica Gel sound people already know — so that once you step through, the unfamiliar landscapes the record travels to feel properly new. ‘Dr. BOB’ is that doorway between the world people already know and the one we’re introducing. Come back to it after the album ends, and
we think the same song will sound different.
8. What would you say is your greatest strength and weakness as a band making this album?
The strengths and weaknesses of being a band come from the same place. Because four people’s freedoms coexist, deciding on a single thing takes longer and gets more complicated — but through that very process, music none of us could have reached alone gets made. In the end, joy and sorrow, good choices and bad ones, all get shared. To us, that is the biggest inconvenience of being a band — and at the same time, its greatest strength.
9. What's challenged you most in bringing Ballad of You together?
On this album, we spent quite a long time debating whether ‘Metamorphosing’ should actually make the record. Another moment that stayed with us: recording, in a single take, the section near the end of that song — the part we would privately call ‘majestic, booming and holy.’ Finishing music is always hard. But it’s just as meaningful and happy a time, so strangely, once recording ends, the painful memories are the first to disappear. A mild anesthesia, maybe.
10. What advice would you give to aspiring artists?
We don’t think becoming an artist or a band needs to be a goal in itself. What matters more is the long search: what do you see and feel, and in what musical or artistic language do you want to express it? Somewhere in that process a band may take shape, and things like albums and shows may be left behind. In the end those aren’t destinations so much as by-products that appear naturally while you build a language of your own. So rather than deciding first what you want to be called, we hope you keep searching for what it is you want to say.
11. Who would you most like to collaborate with artistically?
Radiohead. To us they’re something close to masters — the band that most changed how we look at and build music, and proof that a group can keep rebuilding its own language without ever stopping being itself. If we ever got to work with them, what we’d want isn’t a feature or a guest part. We’d want the two sounds to slowly trespass into each other while the tension never
releases — that space where you can’t quite tell whose instrument is whose, and nobody in the room relaxes. More than simple fan feeling, it’s the collaboration we think would change us the most.
12: A fun fact about the band?
While we were packing up gear at the end of a recording session, Hanjoo managed to put a scratch on Chunchu’s laptop — and in a studio, a laptop is practically a fifth member of the band. Chunchu was genuinely, quietly furious, which as everyone knows is far more terrifying than shouting.
Hanjoo’s response to the incident was to solemnly vow that from that day on, he would honour Chunchu as his elder brother for life. He remains entirely serious about this.
13: What song have you got on repeat right now - and is anything on Ballad of You already stuck in your own heads?
These days, rather than looping other people’s music, each of us keeps returning to the Ballad of You songs — for quite different reasons. Woonghee has ‘Dr. Bob’ on near-constant repeat at the moment, and Hanjoo keeps returning to ‘Melatonin 88mg’ for vocal practice. Chunchu’s favorite on the album is ‘Molecular Gastronomy’ — fun to play, and listening to it simply puts him in a
good mood. Geonjay has been listening across the whole album while preparing our headline shows, hunting for new ideas — lately he enjoys putting on ‘You Just Wanna Have Fun’ and improvising over it.
14: What's your creative process like when making music, and did it change for this album?
The creative process itself wasn’t drastically different from before, but this time we focused a little more on the ensemble. Rather than stacking each member’s parts with precision, we cared more about how to capture the moments when the four of us breathe together — so takes played in one go really mattered, and when a good flow appeared, we tried to follow it as far as it would go.
In the studio there are definitely strict sides to us, but also remarkably loose ones. For example: nobody — with perfect equality — keeps to the schedule. (laughs) Having been together this long and grown a little older, we’ve gained a generosity of ‘well, so what if it slips a little.’ But when a good moment arrives, we’re quick to notice and jump on board. Lyrics we write fairly freely, as they come. On this album, rather than explaining the concept of circulation directly, it was closer to gathering the images and sentences that surfaced around it — hoping that many sentences orbiting the same track would keep producing slightly different
scenes, rather than delivering one exact story.
15: This year, what can we expect - and where does Ballad of You take you next?
Our third album Ballad of You comes out on August 20, and on September 26–27 we open the tour at KSPO Dome in Seoul — the biggest headline show we’ve ever played. From there our first-ever Asia tour takes us through Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore in October, before wrapping up in Tokyo at Spotify O-EAST on November 21. This record was written with the live stage in mind, so wherever the album leads us, it leads us onstage. Playing more cities, in front of faces we’ve never seen — that’s what we’re most excited about this year.