23 YEARS OF SCREAMING: Hardcore veterans Hollow Jan on sticking it out
Written by Jamie Finn (@jamiefinn2209)
Korea’s screamo icons, Hollow Jan, have chaos in their DNA. Their off-again-on-again status and their reputation for riotous, high-energy shows make it seem like calamity follows them. Yet, underneath the noisy appearance, Hollow Jan are a band looking for stability and balance. Ahead of their performance at Block Party on Saturday 12th September, they talk to Debaser about their entire journey so far and staying afloat in the future.
Hollow Jan take to the scorchingly hot Saturday afternoon stage at Pentaport. It’s the third biggest stage of the festival, but the crowd there is bigger and more energised than it’s been all weekend. It’s been 16 years since they played Pentaport. Their performance is an absolute smash, with the crowd going fucking nuts. Hollow Jan would go on to be one of the most talked about artists of the weekend. This is a show that has a special meaning for the band, and their long-standing fans who’ve been waiting a long time to see Hollow Jan return to Korea’s largest festival.
Formed in Seoul in October 2003, Hollow Jan emerged out of the winding down of another project. Bassist Jeong Dongjin, drummer Park Sangcheol and vocalist Lim Hwantaek had been in a band before, but had to split due to an all-too-familiar story here in Korea. "We'd already played together, then had to put everything on hold for military service," Hwantaek explains. "By the time we were discharged, we were already talking about getting back into it." Guitarist Lee Gwangjae joined through a mutual friend, and the band's now-signature sound, somewhere between shoegaze’s tender heart and hardcore’s fury, fell into place almost by accident. "We went back and forth on direction for a while, and our current style is just where we naturally landed."
Only two of that original line-up remain today, Lim and Lee, and the remaining members maintain a kind of closeness. "We hardly ever see each other in person, but we're talking almost every single day," they say.
Despite often being billed as the only screamo band in the country, Hollow Jan are quick to set the record straight and give props to another name. "Honestly, that's just not true. 49morphines were doing this before us, and they're still going. We came after them."
Whether you see Korea’s screamo scene as having one, two, or a couple more names, it is undeniably small. This fact has made it difficult for Hollow Jan since day one. Screamo, as they describe it, sat awkwardly between two established scenes. "Early on, screamo just didn't fit anywhere, stuck somewhere between hardcore and punk on one side and alternative rock on the other," Hwantaek says. "There were nights we'd look at the lineup and think, ‘Are we even supposed to be here?' At some point we just stopped caring." These days, that discomfort has largely evaporated. "We ended up mixing with bands from every genre, and it's honestly not an issue for us anymore."
Hollow Jan's debut album, Rough Draft in Progress, arrived in December 2006 on Dope Entertainment to critical acclaim, taking Best Rock Album at the 2008 Korean Music Awards. The recognition, the band admit, changed things in ways that mattered practically as much as artistically. "It changed everything for us as a band," they say. "Bigger stages started calling, and we even ended up touring overseas off the back of it."
But, despite the momentum, life got in the way, and things began to slow down. Balancing music with careers and, eventually, families proved difficult, and the band effectively dissolved. "We were all just starting out in our careers back then, and trying to hold down a day job and a band at the same time was brutal.” "Tensions built up, and things fell apart pretty naturally." For close to a year, they lost touch entirely, until an unexpected invitation brought them back together. "Club Ssam came to us out of nowhere with an offer to play their closing show. That's the only reason we got back in a room together."
Even that reunion did not immediately spark new work. It took a chance meeting, at a funeral of all places, to set the wheels turning again on what would become Day Off, released in 2014 and built around the theme of mortality. "I ran into Lee Gwangjae again, of all places, at a friend's funeral," Hwantaek recalls. "We got talking, and he asked me to feature on a solo track he was working on. The second I heard the demo, something just clicked; I knew I had to sing it." That track became Day2: the day before, and its creation reopened something for them. "People around me kept passing away, one after another, and I needed somewhere to put all of that. That's really where Day Off came from."
The eight years between albums were not simply quiet; they were, by the band's own account, a period of uncertainty and contemplation. "That first album was basically all the anxiety, passion and anger I'd been carrying around in my early twenties, finally boiling over," Hwantaek says. "But life got in the way, and there were times I genuinely tried to bury all of that." What kept the band alive, in the end, was not ambition. "It was never really about success or hitting some goal, I think I just didn't want to stop being in a band. And weirdly, I don't think Day Off could have existed without that whole stretch of doing nothing."
Sung entirely in Korean, Hollow Jan's music can be looked at through the lens of han, the culturally specific Korean concept of accumulated sorrow. The band push back gently on that reading. "It was never about 'han' specifically; we just wanted to get at the things anyone feels living a life, happiness, sadness, anger, all of it," they say. "Korean simply let us say those things more honestly than English would have." Beyond the language choice itself, they are wary of reading too much national identity into the work. "Past that, I think forcing some bigger connection to Korean identity onto it would be a stretch."
That same pursuit for honesty and expression carries into their live shows, which have earned a reputation for catharsis and expression. "I don't go in with a script or any fixed way of doing things," the band say. "Whatever I'm feeling in that moment just goes straight into the performance, no filter. That's probably why the unexpected keeps happening on stage."
As for what comes next, the ambitions remain refreshingly unglamorous. "I'm honestly not thinking in terms of big dreams anymore, more just how much longer we can realistically keep this going.” "Twenty-three years in now, and everyone's got bills to pay; some of the guys have got wives and kids. So if you want to call something a goal, just not breaking up is probably it." There is, however, one new aim. "We're finally playing Europe this year, our first time, so who knows, that might stir up some new dreams we haven't thought of yet."
But before that, they’re doing some Korean festivals, including Zandari, our own Block Party, and of course, Pentaport. After their own performance, vocalist Lim Hwantaek made additional guest appearances with The Geeks and Fat Hamster & Kang New. For all three of these, the audience went crazy, showing that however long this Hollow Jan active stint lasts, the crowd are fully behind them.