Jaurim & Two Others
Song Hooryeong: “YouTube’s a thing kids these days do. We didn’t do anything like YouTube back in our day. We had Cyworld …” So says Lee Sunkyu, guitarist and leader of Jaurim, a band with 30 years under their belt. Lead singer Kim Yuna sees things differently. In the YouTube era, she argues, even a 30-year-old band needs its own web series. And once Kim lays the groundwork, Jaurim & Two Others follows just like that. They launched a channel with a mockumentary out of nowhere, urged fans to subscribe at a festival they headlined, and eventually started handing out flyers backstage to younger artists.

10CM was one of the artists that saw that flyer, and ended up being the first guest on “Club Goksori,” a series that pays homage to how Jaurim used to play the club Blue Devil in the Hongdae district of Seoul on Thursday nights. At one point, Jaurim says 10CM’s signature song “Americano” is actually punk at heart, pointing out how the lyrics have words like “sundaeguk” and “sageulse”—lyrics about food and paying rent. “I was thinking punk when I wrote it,” he replies, stunned. “The whole point of the song was to convey that through an acoustic sound.” Just like that, the group nails the intention behind the song after it’s gone unnoticed for years and years. “Nobody thinks of a live music club when they hear the word ‘club’ anymore,” 10CM says, delighted at how the series has been named. “Club Goksori” really does conjure up the atmosphere of 1990s live clubs, where music and conversation mingled together.

Now that the doors to this old practice are open again, it’s the faces of a new musical era filling it. “The huge and beautiful wheel that is XLOV has only just started turning on its track,” Kim tells the androgynous, “genderless” group when they’re on. “It’s all thanks to everyone’s dedication and hard work.” The same spirit runs through a recurring segment on “Club Goksori” where Jaurim covers their guests’ songs, essentially putting their stamp of approval on and throwing their support behind the next generation of artists. It’s the same drive that’s allowed Jaurim’s music to keep evolving all these years, and it’s likely also what pushed them onto YouTube in the first place. The way they embrace the next generation also makes it exciting to speculate on what kind of musical landscape the “purple rainforest,” as their name literally means, will paint next.

“The Journey to Gyeongju”
Nam Sunwoo (“CINE21” reporter): A trip to Gyeongju. The eccentric behavior of Gyeongju’s family as they act in her memory. Both are possible readings of the original Korean title of “The Journey to Gyeongju,” which follows a mother, Oksil (Lee Jung-eun), and her three daughters, Jangju (Kong Hyo-jin), Yeongju (Park Sodam), and Dongju (Lee Yeon), as they head to the city of Gyeongju to avenge the youngest daughter, also named Gyeongju, murdered eight years earlier on a school trip. And with them in the trunk of the old van they’re driving is the murderer, who they kidnapped with a specialist’s help. Kill the killer and bury the body—that’s the plan.

The sisters, accompanying their half-unraveled mother and dreaming up the perfect crime, are constantly glued to the news. On the road in particular, they’re tuned into the radio and have their eyes on their phones, spending all day worrying whether the police have tracked down the killer and whether their own scheme’s been found out. Most of the time, the news is just another piece of media, sometimes even background noise, going on about somebody else’s problems. But some things you can only know once the story’s been about you. You can take an incident and present it as one self-contained piece of information, but there’s countless stories out there never to be told in the highly polished language of a news report. Even the people living through them run up against the limits of what words can capture. Maybe that failure to communicate, and the scars it leaves behind, is the map director Kim Mijo followed while making “The Journey to Gyeongju.” For those who’ve already felt that kind of pain, there’s no dramatic fix waiting for them. There’s no going back to before the blood was spilled. All that’s left is to face how it changed everyone. The movie makes allowances for some comedy and action here and there, but pathos is always at the core, and it brings the audience in on the grief. And the outstanding ensemble cast makes all of it work.

Moong Shin Ae
Baek Seolhui (writer, columnist): This summer, girl group RESCENE swept Korea by storm with what’s practically a miracle when it comes to idols signed to smaller labels. Their YouTube channel, “Hello I Am WONI Nice To Meet You,” absolutely blew up, and they landed, about two years after debuting, their first-ever music show win. Watching it happen, though, you can’t help but wonder—what’s in store for all the other small-time idols who never got a miracle of their own? Well, for one of them, a young woman who’s already been-there-done-idol, her cover of RESCENE’s song “Deja Vu” has already been viewed 300,000 times. Her channel’s called Moong Shin Ae—a play on her real name, Moon Shin Ae—but she used to go by Lara when she was a member of DreamNote. DreamNote debuted in 2018 with the single “Dreamlike,” but by 2025, after just six singles, they parted ways with their agency and were no more.

As someone who once walked that same road herself, RESCENE’s success must have hit differently for Moon Shin Ae. She says that covering RESCENE’s song earned her the support she never got back then, that memories of DreamNote makes her root for RESCENE even harder, and that through them, she’s come to feel at peace with both where she’s at now and with her DreamNote days. “I started thinking that, if you keep on struggling, that eventually turns into swimming,” she said, “and if you keep swimming, this ocean starts to feel like your own.” Though she’s on a different path now, let’s take a moment to cheer on all the been-there-done-idols struggling in their own way to swim through an ocean they can call their own.