Magic Strawberry Sound
K-Pop
Release Preview: Silica Gel Shines with Sogumm in Mesmerizing Collaboration “I’MMORTAL”
Silica Gel is back, this time with an unexpected partner.
Since its 2015 debut, four-piece modern rock band Silica Gel has built a distinctive discography around a mantra of “exploring music itself”. The band’s work is brash and often inscrutable, but always sensual and visceral, focusing on psychedelic ambiance and sparkling bursts of sound.
This curious accessibility has granted Silica Gel an indie darling status as well as critical acclaim; the two-time Korean Music Award winners have also been a mainstay in Hellokpop’s own year-end reviews (including our Best Rock and Alternative Song of 2020 and runner-up in 2017).
Silica Gel announced this week that its latest single, “I’mmortal” (stylized “I’MMORTAL”), will release on June 25.
It’s a provocatively dual title; label Magic Strawberry Sound explains that the song is themed around dissociation and emphasizes the “counteraction occurring between its elements”.
On initial listen of “I’mmortal”, I found myself mentally separating the track into a few sections based on how they sounded and how they were written. The song seemed a collage of divergent sonic moods and stories and even writing styles, with each stanza essentially being its own vignette.
But sounds-wise it actually is coherent: there is a memorable motif that recurs both as background melody and as topline, and it’s the nonstop variation in texture and application of these notes that makes the song hardly ever repeat itself. It invites compartmentalization, to hear what makes the vignettes unique, but it’s also persuasively connected.
Notably, the track features AOMG’s Sogumm as a vocalist and lyricist, making for a meeting of two fiercely individualistic teams. We’re told that she and Silica Gel’s Kim Chunchu and Kim Hanjoo all wrote their lyrics separately and then pieced them together, which explains that wild disparity in writing styles.
Sogumm’s presence is unmistakable in this song as always – a pensive dreaminess that seeps into the soundscape. The way that Silica Gel balances this alongside the band’s own energetic play in anthemic, exhorting fashion is the song’s great attraction, and also perhaps the aforementioned “counteraction”.
“I’mmortal” will be available via all major music outlets at 6pm KST on June 25.
You can follow Silica Gel on the following platforms: 
Instagram, 
Twitter, 
YouTube. Check out their discography on Spotify and Apple Music.
PR Source: Magic Strawberry Sound.
