South Korean songwriter, singer, and producer 박혜진 Park Hye Jin’s type may be described as “informal confrontation.” Regardless of the smoothness of her burnished deep home, she is aggressively matter-of-fact about who she is and what she stands for. Certainly one of her earliest singles was referred to as “I DON’T CARE,” in any case. However her self-released new album, Sail the Seven Seas, means that she’s had a tough time of late. Life on the street—years of touring mixed with strikes from Seoul to Melbourne, London, and Los Angeles—heightened her self-reliance and intensified her loneliness. Regardless of its summery vibes, Sail the Seven Seas is usually stormy going, venturing into uneven emotional waters that often depart her adrift in her emotions.

Park’s finest work has surfed between twinkling home melodies and ruthlessly intense drums. Her type is each distinctive and versatile, folding in disparate style experiments whereas at all times highlighting her signature instrument: her voice. Park’s monotone will be ingenious: singing, rapping, spitting, and sighing her lyrics to each dreamy and punishing impact. On a music like “Are you able to,” the interaction between the heart beat of her infatuation and the undertow of her contempt felt panoramic, a portrait of a lady in deep romantic battle.

To date, although, she hasn’t fairly been in a position to maintain a music collectively together with her voice alone. Park falls into this lure at a number of factors on Sail the Seven Seas, the place scaled-back manufacturing leaves her already shaky vocals painfully entrance and middle. The title observe’s lyrics are emotionally bare, however the wistful piano is musically inert, failing to move her wish-in-a-bottle longing anyplace in any respect. Her voice is best served when it’s employed as a percussive instrument. She tears into her verses with gusto on “Bklyn Babe” and “Intercourse on the Seashore,” which function a few of her finest rapping thus far. However she undercuts that versatility by too usually falling again on blunt-force repetition. The annoyance and desperation implied within the hook of “Tryna Get to over You” doesn’t come by in her disaffected chant, and although “N.Y.C.” options some cool sonic detailing, her mantra-like loop (“New York Metropolis… New York Metropolis…”) falls flat.

After her earlier forays into footwork, techno, and lure, Sail the Seven Seas folds chillwave into Park’s repertoire. Synths flare and fade like sunsets on “Foreigner,” whereas a dusky guitar riff opens up Park’s leapfrogging verses on “Bklyn Babe.” These tropical accents are a automobile for some fraught feelings. Frustration is a serious theme, and all through the album, Park addresses a litany of slights and insults in humorous, plainspoken language. On “Foreigner,” she recounts the indignities of the immigration course of in a venomous deadpan: “Let me get a inexperienced card, I don’t need to marry you! I don’t want you for a inexperienced card! I’m fucking proficient!” The stupidity of the hurdles that Park has to place up with requires a pointy rebuke, and he or she delivers.

As satisfying as it may be to listen to Park mild into impolite workers, border stooges, clueless fits, and racist assholes, one longs for the artist to search out some sense of security and safety in order that she’s not continuously on the defensive. Her best work reconciles hardness and softness, power and vulnerability. The penultimate observe, “California,” fuses a rollicking drum break with breezy G-funk synths, making full use of her skills as a rapper, and ends with a call-and-response in Korean that she solutions for herself: “Who’s the one? I’m the one.” Whether or not this self-produced, self-released album is supposed as a profession reset or a manner of marking time between larger tasks, Sail the Seven Seas is a reminder that Park doesn’t take instructions from anybody.