Two years after I listened to All, eundohee returns with her first full length. She also released a three track single, My Neighborhood, in 2020 which slipped past my radar. Unforeseen is a continuation of her melancholy indie music and expands her soundscape with songs that contain more depth. I’ve come back to the album repeatedly because it’s a really great album.
“Uncertainty” is an introduction to new listeners and a refresh for people familiar with her style. At two minutes, it glances the surface of eundohee’s perspective. A lot of Unforeseen has English vocals and they blend with the instrumentals as a mixed layer, but that doesn’t subtract from her mellow voice.
Unforeseen really gets started with “Time.” The track is a mixture of Big Baby Driver and Momentsyumi, two other singer-songwriter artists who know how to manipulate genres to match a unique soundscape. The song arrangement is simple, verse to verse to chorus, but its eundohee’s mellow and warm vocals that keep everything engaging. She’s not in a hurry and the walking pace tempo allows the listener to enjoy every moment. The song takes its time before moving to “Songbird.”
I’m not sure if eundohee prefers to sing in a slightly whisper tonal quality, but the calmness that is shown on “Songbird” is compelling. I think the percussion is a programmed rhythm, but it doesn’t just repeat over and over. Instead, percussion plays a part in segmenting the verses. As with the previous songs, the slower tempo helps you dwell inside the music.
“Les Augen I” and “Les Augen II” feel like two sides of a coin. There’s an expanded audio vision and a bigger focus on eundohee’s vocals. They sit above the instrumentals and play a bigger guiding lead. “Les Augen I” uses a varied drum groove that works with the other instrumentals when it feels like they should be fighting. Every moment in the track is carefully placed so every moment can be consumed.
“Les Augen II” moves towards the back of the beat. It’s composed differently from “Les Augen I,” but also is also tonally separate from the first few songs on Unforeseen. The pair complement each other perfectly. “Superficial Conversation” goes back to the more mellow songs with the keyboards adding a background tone that plays throughout the song. This gives a balance between her vocals and the guitar.
The song most similar to All would be “Tongue.” It’s also the track that sounds like it has live drums as opposed to programmed beats. The drum tracks on Unforeseen don’t feel artificial, but the natural rhythms come forward here. “Blue T-shirt” closes Unforeseen with a feature by Shin Onyu. The song is mainly an instrumental with only a couple verses of vocals. Using this song to close the album was a great decision because it’s a calming and enjoyable listen at the end of eight songs.
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Chris P
Korean Indie owner and Editor at Large. Constantly looking for new music and working on library parity on Spotify and YouTube Music.