‘We weren’t planning to be this popular!’ Australian-Korean rappers 1300 hit the big time

In director Park Chan-wook’s 2003 neonoir thriller Oldboy, a person is held captive for 15 years earlier than being stuffed in a trunk and hauled out into an empty area, left alone to remedy the thriller of how he acquired there and why.

Two many years and eight,000km away, the members of high-octane hip-hop collective 1300 (pronounced one-three-hundred) clean down their collars, mess up their hair and do their greatest impressions of the character Oh Dae-su and the goons terrorising him for his or her single, additionally named Oldboy. But the place Oh Dae-su stood alone, 1300 mob the digicam as a pack, grinning whereas rapping with a few of the most spectacular supply seen in an Australian outfit in years.

1300 producer and singer Nerdie describes the affect of the movie – and South Korean tradition broadly – on the music 1300 is now making in the suburbs of Sydney. “I watched a lot of fucked-up movies when I was a kid,” the 24-year-old says. “I had free rein. My grandpa had a DVD store in the garage where you’d rent out, like, bootleg DVDs. I just watched all of this crazy shit. I watched iRobot on repeat for like a week.”

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He and rapper Rako, additionally 24, are talking to Guardian Australia on a break from a day in the studio. They move a vape forwards and backwards between them as they recall how they met their fellow band members – rappers Dali Hart, 23, and Goyo, 26, and producer Pokari.Sweat, 31 – in 2020, after noticing each other floating round the Korean music neighborhood in Sydney. “It’s not a big scene,” Nerdie clarifies. “It’s just like a few people.”

In early 2021, once they launched their breakout single No Caller ID, it was clear 1300 had hit on a uncommon chemical response. “You don’t need to speak the tongue to know this is a banger,” Koolism’s Hau Latukefu, the host of Triple J’s devoted hip-hop present, wrote in a evaluation.

1300 bend and meld Korean and English into their lyrics, whereas their manufacturing attracts from each up to date references – from SoundCloud rap to home and hardstyle – and the emo and punk-pop they consumed as children.

“We all grew up listening to what teenagers would listen to in Australia,” Nerdie says, name-checking Fallout Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Linkin Park, alongside dance and US hip-hop. “Me and [Pokari.Sweat] are Australian, so there’s an extremely western influence on the production – I guess that’s why it might feel a bit different to Korean people making western sounds in Korea.”

Rako’s expertise was slightly totally different; he grew up in Perth, however nearly completely consumed music popping out of Korea. “Our five members’ music tastes [vary], and the amount of exposure to Korean culture is also different,” he says. Between them, they run the spectrum “from non-Korean culture to very Korean culture – and we meet in the middle”.

On their debut mixtape Foreign Language, 1300 actually flex their muscle groups, refusing to sit in a single place for too lengthy. For each slick and sensible track like Rocksta, there’s a observe like Ralph – listening to it looks like sticking your head in a pinball machine. Like Oh Dae-su heaving himself out of the trunk, 1300 catapults you into the future and leaves you to fill in the blanks of how you bought there.

They’re following up the launch of the file with a string of stay reveals, notably a spot at Splendour in the Grass and nationwide dates supporting Confidence Man, after a pitstop at the Sydney Opera House as a part of Vivid.

It’s a major present for a band who weren’t certain, a yr in the past, whether or not Australia had the abdomen for what they have been getting ready.

“We never thought that Australian music people would pick our music up,” Rako says. “You know, we write in Korean. We always thought, the language barrier is a pretty big fence to go over.”

“It just doesn’t exist in your mind, like the possibility that it could work,” Nerdie agrees. “Just cause you’re a Korean kid. Making weird hip-hop music. In Australia. It just doesn’t make any sense, like why would people like this? Come on!”

Over time, the boundaries round a style like Australian hip-hop – one which, for many years, solely sounded and regarded like one factor – have come down, and new voices have grown louder. “There’s two generations,” Nerdie says: “all the classics” he adopted rising up, together with 360, Kerser and Hilltop Hoods, and “this sort of new generation of more diverse artists that are doing afrobeat and all kinds of different stuff” – amongst them Genesis Owusu, whose stay reveals 1300 have supported, Agung Mango and Raj Mahal, each of whom characteristic on Foreign Language.

“It’s just been such a shift in mindset,” Nerdie says, of how Australia’s love for 1300 has led him and his bandmates to take what they’re doing extra severely. But he might simply as simply be speaking about the years of gradual, incremental change which have led to the level the place 1300 are actually, rising as the most promising and dynamic act Australia has produced in years.

“We weren’t planning to be this big, to be this popular. We didn’t think anyone would like it, to be honest. But there’s no limit to where it can go now.”

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