Luci Gang cooks up fresh hip-hop flavor with latest album
Luci Gang appears at Rolling Hall in western Seoul, Aug. 21. Courtesy of Justin Kyle
Walking down into the basement venue in Sangsu felt like meeting an old friend.
I'd been a fan of Seoul's indie hip-hop scene right up until the pandemic hit in 2020, and I never quite got the magic back after that. Venues I used to go to closed for good. Lockdowns worldwide coincided with a boom in Korean culture abroad, but the wave that broke through leaned almost entirely toward K-dramas and K-pop. Since then, there hasn’t been much in the local hip-hop scene that got me excited.
Then "HEADLOCK" turned up in my feed one day in the middle of July. I didn't know who Luci Gang was, but the song and the video caught me immediately, a two-minute house-inflected gut-punch that felt unapologetically quirky and infectious.
It's the standout single off her third album, "Rolling Stone," from an independent rapper, born Lee Eun-seon, who has spent six years building a catalog almost entirely outside the traditional label system. The song has been traveling. It even landed on rap veteran Lupe Fiasco's Instagram story, which drew even more support and made clear it's resonating with international audiences too, not just local ones.
I got the chance to see that momentum up close on Aug. 21, when Luci Gang played her first solo headline concert at Rolling Hall, a standing-room show that sold out well ahead of its 7:30 p.m. start. Before the show, I got a chance to sit down with the artist to talk through the making of "Rolling Stone."
She showed up looking unbothered and easily approachable, her signature perm as loose and tousled as ever. She spoke to me in a mix of Korean and English, switching between the two mid-thought without missing a beat.
When asked how she'd describe the new album's sound, she landed on an unexpected comparison.
"I think it's like... tom yum goong," she said. "It's like a little bit sour and a little bit spicy and a little bit, I don't know how to describe the word. But I tried to fit a lot of different things into it. That's kind of the feeling I wanted to express."
It's a fitting way to put it, and it tracks with how the record actually sounds. If the title of her 2021 debut, "Lucifer's Therapy," told you anything about where she once stood, "Rolling Stone" feels like the other side of that: more accessible, but not in a way that reads as chasing anyone's trend. It sounds like an artist who has moved past a harder stretch, past a time when the music existed to process pain, into something looser: a way of just being herself across a lot of different emotional facets at once. It's fun, dynamic, bright and approachable in the way a friend is approachable once they've come out the other side of something difficult and started looking at life a little more kindly.
Back at Rolling Hall that night, she'd opened her set with the first track off her debut album, a choice she said wasn't random.
"I felt like starting with that would be really meaningful, so I brought it back," she told me. "And then it gradually gets more like this album, it'll have that back-and-forth kind of feeling. A little bit hyped, then a little rapping, then jumping around — that kind of feeling."
As a fan of hip-hop myself, I was curious what's actually been in her rotation lately. She checked her phone at one point because, as she put it, she listens "to lots of genres" and can't keep every artist's name straight. Among the names she rattled off were Joey Valence & Brae and her personal favorite Tyler, the Creator. "I think a lot of hip-hop still went into it," she said of the mix.
There's a particular kind of relief in watching an artist go viral entirely on her own terms: no agency-built fandom infrastructure, no years of trainee polish, no committee deciding which version of her personality gets to reach an audience. I asked what she made of the wider scene around her, the one that leans so hard into manufactured formulas.
"I think it's really complicated," she said. "I feel like the hip-hop scene has been changing a lot lately. People are trying a lot of electronic styles. But I think some people are just following the trends, and some people are really genuine about it. I just feel like I do my own thing."
Asked where she sees herself a year from now, she laughed before answering. "It's really hard to imagine. But I want to play a U.K. festival, I want to go there." A world tour, she added, would have to wait: "I'm not ready for that right now. But maybe next year."
Luci Gang performs at Rolling Hall in western Seoul, Aug. 21. Courtesy of Justin Kyle
As a fan of local indie music generally, I'm just glad to have met her, to have discovered her music and to have watched her perform it with a constant smile on her face. She comes across as genuinely down to earth, someone who deserves the success she's found on her own terms. Whatever "Rolling Stone" ends up meaning for the wider Korean hip-hop scene, I'm looking forward to seeing where she goes next.
Visit bio.to/lucigang for more information.
Justin Kyle is a writer, photographer, and content creator based in Seoul who covers Korean cinema, culture and travel. His YouTube channel, The Seoul Scene, provides travel guides for South Korea.