Peggy Gou – I Hear You

I Hear You, the debut album by South Korean producer, DJ and singer Peggy Gou, sets the barometer for summer. It's a nostalgia-soaked ode to 90s and 00s dance that harnesses Gou’s specific brand of cool to ensure it stays very much on the curve, ensuring Gou retains her position as house music’s current tastemaker.

Ultimately, though, I Hear You tightrope-walks impeccable route one dance music and stylistic subversions that flirt with sonic bravery without ever taking a committed leap. All That embodies these forays, a lethargic breakbeat gently nudging a chorus that echoes the rhythmic bob of Buffalo Stance, joyous in its sampling of the famous opening of 2003’s love-to-hate-it Kevin Lyttle hit Turn Me On.

Gou is most recognisable at I Hear You’s midpoint, heralded by song of last summer (It Goes Like) Nanana, the de facto Café del Mar theme tune that glitters amidst the tracklist even now. The sunny disposition of the former sets for Lobster Telephone, with hi-NRG elements nostalgic of ATC’s Around the World (La La La La La) that lead to a contemptuous stab of acid house, rubber stamping Gou’s Eurodance credentials.

Though I Hear You can feel particularly ephemeral – five of the album’s ten tracks having been released prior to the record proper – Gou’s vision is omnipresent throughout, and is explicitly stated on opening track Your Art, a techno-fused adaptation of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s poem Your Planet Seen From Within, a mission statement to ‘make the artwork again… [to] create your universe anew’. I Hear You acts as Gou’s catalyst for this very notion, an earnest but keenly self-aware synchronisation of Gou’s ‘eyes on the Top 40’ dance music with an artistry that is both curious and willing.

Listen to: Back to One, Lobster Telephone, Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)