PATiENTS made a successful tour last month in the UK passing through Bristol, Southampton and London. The group presented their new release
Let's Drive, Let's Go in a total of six gigs. KoME had the opportunity to talk with the bassist
Sumin Jo about the tour, the meaning behind "hybrid punk rock" and their plans for the future.
Could you please introduce yourselves and explain the meaning behind your band’s name?
Sumin Jo: We’re a three-piece band from Seoul, Korea called
PATiENTS! Our band was formed in 2005. We like to call our musical style “hybrid punk".
The word “patients” in Korean is a homonym. It means both “sick people” and “happy people”. I chose this to be our band’s name because I think that even when Korean society hurts, there’s still happiness to be found.
PATiENTS went on a tour on UK for the first time. How was it? Do you have a special memory from the shows and places you went?
Sumin Jo: Our UK tour was a lot of fun. We had many new and interesting experiences, met lots of new people, discovered some new bands and learned lots. My favorite memory from the tour was our final gig. It was a house show in London at a place called Astbury Castle. We played in the kitchen and everyone was dancing. There was even people crowd surfing! That was the craziest time I've ever had in a kitchen!
That show was actually our second gig in London. Some people who saw our first concert in the city came and saw us again that night, which made us really happy.
You are a "hybrid punk rock" band, could you explain to us what the "hybrid" brings to punk rock in your sound?
Sumin Jo: “Hybrid punk” is a musical term we came up with. It’s our own musical style. We created the term because we wanted to separate ourselves from bands that have a fixed image of punk. For me, real punk rock embraces the notion of creation by destruction and always tries to do something different. Another reason why we created the term was to give ourselves more musical freedom. Since “hybrid punk” is our own style we can do whatever we want! We love punk’s DIY attitude but try to draw from a wide musical spectrum when creating new music.
How is your composition process?
Sumin Jo: Usually I bring song parts or ideas to the guys and then we work on the songs together. But recently our keyboardist,
Hyuckjang, has been coming up with some song ideas on his own too. The only rule we have when making music is that we throw a song away if any of us don’t like it.
PATiENTS originally formed almost 10 years ago. When looking back, how would you say you have improved the most? What kind of things do you do differently today?
Sumin Jo: In our early years,
PATiENTS had a strong classic punk sound and style. We still love classic punk rock but we want to have our own style now. So we've been trying out different things and exploring different directions. One of the biggest differences with
PATiENTS today is that we've got a keyboardist in the band instead of a guitarist. This allows us to try and take our music to even more new places.
PATiENTS just finished their tour and went back home. Do you have more plans going on? What the fans can expect in the future?
Sumin Jo: We’re going to start working on our next full-length album. We created a new EP called
Let's Drive, Let's Go before our UK tour. We sold the EP at our gigs in the UK and were originally planning to officially release it in Korea in June, but we've now decided that
Let's Drive, Let's Go will be a tour only EP and we’re going to wait until our full-length disc is done to release something officially.
We’re looking at options for other overseas tours right now and are hoping to head abroad again before the year is over.
Please, could you leave a message to our readers?
Sumin Jo: Thanks so much to KoME for interviewing us. And thanks so much to all of you for taking the time to read about
PATiENTS. Please check out the new songs on our tour EP,
Let's Drive, Let's Go! You can listen to them
here. We hope to have more new music for you soon. And we hope to meet you one day at a
PATiENTS gig in Korea or somewhere else in the world!
KoME would like to thank PATiENTS and Shawn Despres to make this interview possible.
