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■ A Berklee Graduate Composer Resisting Trend Consumption
The true value of Lee Joo-hun as a producer lies in his hands-on role in crafting RESCENE’s music and building an in-house team of lyricists and composers under his direction. In today’s K-POP landscape, figures who are both founders and composers—like JYP’s Park Jin-young or HYBE’s Bang Si-hyuk—are actually quite rare.
The star songwriters who have long driven K-POP—SM’s Yoo Young-jin, YG’s TEDDY, or Bang Si-hyuk—typically devoured cutting-edge pop music from the U.S. and beyond, churning out vast quantities of songs. This approach, while prolific, has often invited shadows of imitation or plagiarism debates.
Lee Joo-hun, however, stands apart from that current.
His musical stance feels akin to that of KENZIE, the female composer from Berklee who now leads SM Entertainment’s music direction. Like KENZIE, who once declared, “I won’t listen to music unless it’s in CD quality,” he doesn’t seem to be the type who binge-consumes pop trends and churns out symbolic creations from them (though he has admitted, “I could never get interested in music as an academic pursuit”).
When composers trained at music conservatories confront the pop music world, there often emerges a tendency toward aspiring for “evergreen quality”—timeless excellence.
Indeed, RESCENE’s music eschews K-POP’s trendy extremes like aggressive hard techno, Miami bass, or even past fads like moonbahton or deep house. In other words, describing it in terms of existing genres or trends doesn’t quite capture its essence. What you get instead is meticulously constructed, top-tier idol songs—thoroughly beautiful pop tracks—that subtly weave in the zeitgeist and refined soundscapes of our era.
In a time overflowing with music that relies on gimmicks and hooks to make its case, the deliberate stripping away of contrived setups to focus on “pure, unadulterated quality” in songwriting is what’s being discovered by many, propelling chart reversals.
The true value of Lee Joo-hun as a producer lies in his hands-on role in crafting RESCENE’s music and building an in-house team of lyricists and composers under his direction. In today’s K-POP landscape, figures who are both founders and composers—like JYP’s Park Jin-young or HYBE’s Bang Si-hyuk—are actually quite rare.
The star songwriters who have long driven K-POP—SM’s Yoo Young-jin, YG’s TEDDY, or Bang Si-hyuk—typically devoured cutting-edge pop music from the U.S. and beyond, churning out vast quantities of songs. This approach, while prolific, has often invited shadows of imitation or plagiarism debates.
Lee Joo-hun, however, stands apart from that current.
His musical stance feels akin to that of KENZIE, the female composer from Berklee who now leads SM Entertainment’s music direction. Like KENZIE, who once declared, “I won’t listen to music unless it’s in CD quality,” he doesn’t seem to be the type who binge-consumes pop trends and churns out symbolic creations from them (though he has admitted, “I could never get interested in music as an academic pursuit”).
When composers trained at music conservatories confront the pop music world, there often emerges a tendency toward aspiring for “evergreen quality”—timeless excellence.
Indeed, RESCENE’s music eschews K-POP’s trendy extremes like aggressive hard techno, Miami bass, or even past fads like moonbahton or deep house. In other words, describing it in terms of existing genres or trends doesn’t quite capture its essence. What you get instead is meticulously constructed, top-tier idol songs—thoroughly beautiful pop tracks—that subtly weave in the zeitgeist and refined soundscapes of our era.
In a time overflowing with music that relies on gimmicks and hooks to make its case, the deliberate stripping away of contrived setups to focus on “pure, unadulterated quality” in songwriting is what’s being discovered by many, propelling chart reversals.