Parannoul

To See the Next Part of the Dream (2021)

Parannoul recorded the album alone, in his childhood bedroom in Seoul, using cracked software and a consumer-grade interface — guitars distort into static, the mix is dense to the point of incoherence, and everything sounds slightly underwater. But the songs inside the noise are immaculate: 'Beautiful World' and 'White Ceiling' carry melodic ideas strong enough to have survived any production treatment, their burial under noise giving them an emotional weight that a clean recording would have dissipated. It proved that the shoegaze aesthetic is not bound to any particular studio budget, geography, or decade.

Sleeve notes

To See the Next Part of the Dream · 2021

Parannoul is an anonymous South Korean artist who released To See the Next Part of the Dream (2021) on Bandcamp at what turned out to be exactly the right moment for it: the global discovery of shoegaze through streaming had created an audience for bedroom-produced guitar records that sounded like they understood the genre at a molecular level. The album — made alone, the production deliberately lo-fi, the guitar walls built from multiple generations of overdubs — became an internet sensation in a matter of days.

What's remarkable about it is not the production approach (bedroom shoegaze is a genre now, with established conventions) but the emotional quality of the songs underneath: genuinely sad, genuinely adolescent in the way that carries something universal rather than merely personal. After the Magic (2022) refined the sound with better production and maintained the emotional directness. Parannoul represents a specific possibility of the streaming era — an artist working in complete privacy who finds a global audience for something that would have been irreducibly local a decade earlier.