NEXT (South Korean band)

NEXT (Korean: 넥스트; stylized as N.EX.T, short for New EXperiment Team) was a South Korean rock band that built a reputation on provocative songs targeting social injustice. Founded by pioneering experimental rock vocalist Shin Hae-chul, the group released its first album, Home, in 1991. Over its active years, the band underwent many lineup changes, and it has been on indefinite hiatus since Shin’s death in 2014.

Shin Hae-chul’s band originally split after the 1997 album Lazenca: A Space Rock Opera, with its instrumentalists going on to form the alternative metal group Novasonic alongside rapper Kim Jun Pyo. N.EX.T reformed around 2003 after Novasonic disbanded, and they created the soundtrack for the Korean release of Guilty Gear XX #Reload. Some instrumental tracks from that score were later given vocals for the album The Return Of N.EX.T Part 3: The Book of War/The Diary of a Soldier, released in 2006, which featured the song “Dear America” with contributions from prominent Korean vocalists including Kim Jun Pyo and Crash’s Ahn Heung-Chan.

Guitarist Kim Se-hwang released his first solo album, Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, in 2010. In 2014, Shin Hae-chul died from cardiac arrest after receiving poor medical care following a surgery in which a surgeon illegally performed a gastric bypass without the patient’s consent. The band made its final public appearance at the Pentaport Rock Festival on August 8, 2015, as a special memorial stage with various musicians, not a full NEXT performance. Since then, NEXT has been considered inactive.

Themes

The band’s lyrics often carried sharp cultural critiques. “Turn Off the T.V.” and “Money” targeted media saturation and consumerism. Environmental disregard was addressed in “Lazenca, Save Us” and “The World We Made,” the latter contrasting a peaceful natural world with a frightening, industrial human-made one. “Cyber Budha Company Ltd.” imagined a dark future where people could purchase small amounts of divinity through machines and credit cards.

Members

NEXT saw many lineup changes from 1991 to 2014.