Wave To Earth

Two schoolfriends and a word that stuck

Daniel Kim and Dong Q met at middle school in South Korea and began playing together there, years before either had a label or a route into the music industry. The stated ambition at the outset was to make music that would start a new wave, which is where the name came from. Kim has named Radiohead, Oasis, Jeff Buckley, Tame Impala and Bon Iver among the group's reference points, and the inheritance is audible: clean electric guitar with the reverb left on, chord movement that leans towards jazz rather than rock, and drumming that sits behind the beat instead of driving it.

The first release, a single called "wave", came out on 23 August 2019. Bassist John Cha completed the trio, and three EPs followed over the next five years: Wave 0.01 and Summer Flows 0.02 in 2020, then Play with Earth! 0.03 in 2024. On 21 November 2021 the band signed to WAVY, the label run by the singer Colde, which gave them an institutional home without steering them towards the industry they are still routinely filed under.

That filing error irritates them. Asked in August 2026 how he would describe the band, Kim's answer was "A band. That is enough." Cha's position was that whatever description gets applied from outside matters far less than whether the listener cares about the music. The members are credited variously — Kim Daniel on vocals and guitar, Cha Soon-jong as John on bass, Shin Dong-gyu as DongQ on drums — which is part of the same resistance to being packaged.

The slow part, then the very fast part

In September 2022 wave to earth had fewer than 400,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. What followed was not gradual. Across one four-week stretch the figure nearly doubled, from 1.8 million to 3.1 million, and by the time of their 2026 album the band was reported at more than seven million monthly listeners. The engine was "seasons", an early track that has passed 500 million streams on its own and remains the song a large share of the audience arrives for.

The debut album, 0.1 Flaws and All, was released on 20 April 2023 and reached number 20 on South Korea's Circle Album Chart — a modest domestic placing set against the international streaming figures, and a reasonable summary of how the band grew: abroad first, at home afterwards. Kim described the A-side as concerned with love and happiness of a non-romantic kind, meaning his bandmates, his friends, his family and the time spent with them. The B-side took the same subject towards heartbreak and wanting.

'bad pieces' and a bed on a messed-up earth

The second album, bad pieces, was released on 7 August 2026, eleven tracks and their first full record in two years. It was preceded by the single "heaven and hell" on 15 May 2026, and carries two title tracks, "courage" and "hyang". Kim said the choice was difficult because every song on the record felt as though it could have been the title.

The album's name points back to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1969 bed-in: Kim's gloss was that "this album is a bed on a messed up earth". The making of it redistributed the work. Cha and Shin contributed substantially more songwriting than on anything the band had put out before, which Kim framed as a deliberately Beatles-shaped division of labour. Three instruments appear in their catalogue for the first time — a nylon-string guitar, a Mini Moog and a CP70 electric grand piano — and the widened palette shows up as folk and psychedelic guitar textures that the earlier records did not have.

Critical reaction has centred on the record's refusal to tidy itself up. One review described songs that linger, repeat themselves and leave feelings unresolved, moving between warmth and melancholy without letting either settle too heavily, and singled out "talking 'bout u", "everything comes and goes" and "skylark". One track, "babo", reached the audience before it was formally released, partly through a Singapore busking session that drew around 1,500 people.

Where the band stands now

The hardware exists: a Band Award at the 2025 Seoul Music Awards, plus nominations across the 2024 and 2025 Korean Music Awards. But the clearest measure of the past year is room size. The pieces tour was announced on 20 May 2026 with general tickets on sale from 21 May, taking in 21 North American cities and eight in Asia, and routing the band through the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on 9 September and Radio City Music Hall in New York on 29 September. The New York night sold out. The band's previous New York headline show had been at the Blue Note, a jazz club.

Toronto told the same story in miniature. The 25 September date at the Theatre at Great Canadian was roughly double the capacity of their 2024 Toronto show. The North American leg ran from Vancouver on 4 September to Irving, Texas on 11 October, with a Mexico City date on 15 September.

Eight Asian shows remain: Bangkok on 12 November, Manila on the 15th, Hong Kong on the 18th, Singapore on the 20th, Kuala Lumpur on the 22nd, Taipei on the 24th, Osaka on the 26th and Tokyo on the 27th. The run then closes at home with two nights at Korea University's Hwajeong Gymnasium in Seoul, on 19 December at 6pm and 20 December at 5pm. Those are the first Korean performances of material from bad pieces, and a step up from the band's earlier Seoul venues.

The living room they carry with them

The staging is domestic by design. The stage is dressed as a mid-century sitting room or home studio — rug, leather couch, lamps throwing warm amber light — with personal objects placed among the gear, including a photograph of Cha's daughter. On the Toronto night, LED panels standing in for windows showed the CN Tower and the city skyline behind the band. Lighting moves with the material, shifting from amber into blue, red and white strobes as the set hardens.

Five musicians play, not three: the trio plus Jeon Min on saxophone and Van Sion on keyboards. That changes what the songs do live. Recorded, they are compact; on stage the arrangements open out into extended instrumental passages, with the saxophone taking long solos and the whole group building intensity together. A writer reviewing the Toronto show found the musicianship almost overwhelming at points.

The audience behaviour is unusual for a band at this scale. Reviewers describe people standing and swaying in unison and singing along word for word, but the atmosphere reads as reflective rather than rowdy, closer to a listening room with 6,000 people in it. One critic's single complaint about Radio City was the number of phones held up, and a wish that the mostly young crowd would spend more of the night watching rather than filming.