There is a noticeable turning point in the career of the band called Silica Gel. They were the new band to watch out for with their high-quality music to match when they debuted with their EP Pure Sun in 2015, and soon after dropped their debut studio album Silica Gel in 2016. They won the EBS SPACE Hello Rookie Grand Prize in November 2016, the Korea Creative Content Agency K-Rookies Grand Prize in January 2017, and the Korean Music Awards Rookie of the Year in February 2017. This amazing feat seemed well deserved even back then. Could this be the result of the public’s excellent taste? Perhaps. But it would probably be more accurate to say it was due to their incredible talents and diligence. Their unmistakable prowess is proven once again when we see another change in their career a few years later. It is no surprise that there is no empty feeling you get a couple years down the line like the rest of the short-lived fads.

They hit a natural stopping point when they served in the army in 2018. The seven-member group that included three VJs who were in charge of the band’s visual aspects including performing and creating videos went through a reshuffle around their hiatus, and now they are back as a four-member group centered on music. They came back in August 2020 with KYO181, and announced a new debut of a band that was new and courageous. They later followed up with “Desert Eagle” in 2021, and “No Pain” in 2022. The two songs won the Korean Music Awards Best Modern Rock Song back-to-back in 2022 and 2023. How have they changed, and what stayed the same since their new debut and their second junction?

Silica Gel sees themselves as a creative collective, and each member functions as individual artists while contributing to the band. This seems like an obvious choice given that they started off as a team whose aim is to create synesthetic works. The way the describe themselves sums up who they are nicely: “We aim for team play rather than teamwork.” Each song is presented to the team, then further developed, and they organically change up the genre, style, and even the roles of the members. Now, add the lyrics that are created more for the feel of their articulation rather than meaning, and you get “brave, new,” and experimental music.

Their noticeable change started with their lyrics. They established a new goal of creating lines that are meaningful to them and conveying them to the listeners as illustrated in “No Pain.” They had no reason to abandon their penchant for the sounds of the words themselves, therefore it was more of an inclusive and additive change instead of a transitional one. Now that the meaning of their songs is more tangible, what they want to do with their album becomes clearer. There is no need for the album to have an all-encompassing concept. But, if they have something to tell, and know how they want to tell it, then there’s no need to avoid doing that either. After “No Pain” we saw singles like “Mercurial,” “Tik Tak Tok,” and the EP Machine Boy throughout 2023. Even with just these tracks, we get an anthem of sorts that defines the band’s 2023 with “No Pain,” “Realize,” and “Tik Tak Tok.” But it is inevitably still difficult to define the band only with their familiar structure, that is driven by the crisp guitar riff.

And this tendency comes together with their second album POWER ANDRE 99. While “On Black” might be the listeners’ top choice, starting with a dream pop noise which transitions into alternative rock, “Eres Tu,” would be what they ultimately aimed for as artists, with its tight structure and instrumentals that are reminiscent of a battle. Listening to these two songs alone can tell the listeners that the album leniently flows back and forth between catering to a wide audience and aiming for artistic heights; “Juxtaposition” starts with a lighthearted chorus, and “Andre99” opens with the drum machine. They maintain their core values that define the team, gain unprecedented popularity as a band, and at the same time, do what they set out to do. This might be the reason why they didn’t see themselves as “friendly” but went with the adjective “enthusiastic” instead.

They call POWER ANDRE 99 mechanical, a quality that they feel they took as far as they could with this album and explained that they’ve now “graduated” from it. In this sense, the band’s second chapter comes to a close with this album. An album can be a part of a chronicle that is written in a certain period and can also be the result of choosing and combining certain colors off a large palette to finish the painting of the present. After two chapters, Silica Gel let us know what sort of music they make as a band. We don’t wait for the band’s creative spark that is yet to come. Instead, we wait for them to cover the canvas in colors that they’ve never used before - colors that are hidden in each album and track, in each member’s individual work. In essence, we have here a band with members who talk about their individual hopes, rather than vague expectations of the future. I’ll go first. I know there’s Hot Chip in there somewhere. I can’t wait to see it.