Boojik Punk Night, featuring TWOFIVE, Monkey Pee Quartet, KrankyDoodle, Dirty Rockhon, The Pandan Wangi, and JEMSON
Club Boojik
Gwangju, South Korea
April 11, 2026
(Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.)
Yang Hong-Joon, frontman for Gwangju punk band Dirty Rockhon, told the crowd at a basement venue called Club Boojik that he’s been having deep thoughts about how to live. I listened in from the front row, having wound my way down the club’s unassuming stairs into its neon-lit music cave to learn just that.
The answer is probably money, Yang concluded. He encouraged everyone in attendance to go out and get lottery tickets after the show, so they might win their way to happy lives.
Then he hesitated. Could foreign visitors, he asked, play the lotto?
Yeah! the crowd answered.
Not that it mattered. The evening’s visiting bands from Southeast Asia had other ideas for their post-punk-night festivities.
“Afterparty!” Mior “Myo” Luqman Hakim of Malaysian band JEMSON suggested in between sessions of glam rock headbanging. Sure, he had another show the next day in Seoul—but this night in Gwangju, where local punk legends shared not just the stage but the community it comes with, was one that could last forever.
During the seven-band bill in the Buk district venue, Kim Hee-Jong struck a guitar chord, sound reverberating off the terraced bench seats and band posters lining the room. One particular poster, dated 2015, featured the name of Kim’s band Monkey Pee Quartet, evidence of how long the group has been pissing their way to punk stardom in Gwangju and Club Boojik specifically.
“Today, we are actually not important,” Kim said in Korean, into the mic. The ones to watch were those who came from other countries to add their shouts to the chorus: along with JEMSON, there was KrankyDoodle from Singapore and The Pandan Wangi from Indonesia.
Kim’s point, shared with a dry irony, was more practical than sentimental: the out-of-town bands needed money for the plane ticket home.
And they played like it. An hour before, when I wandered into the venue early, it had the feel of a chill jam. Band members joked in multiple languages and shared snacks. Frankenstein-ed ditties emerged from refrains the musicians—fans themselves—mindlessly sang as they fiddled with their machines. Air filters buzzed, adding a layer of grunge.
Now, with the stage lights on, the place was unrecognizable. The musicians went all in, making their efforts loud and clear. Beads of sweat flung from their foreheads. I wondered if the sound technician—who zipped in and out of the stage like a spirit, not resting until the mix was just right—had worked some magic with the air filters. More likely, their hum was just overshadowed by the magnitude of sound.
KrankyDoodle’s Razmy Mohamed reiterated the issue at hand, joking that if the band didn’t make enough CD sales for their flight back to Singapore, they were just going to stay.
At this, the crowd cheered. Then they bought CDs anyway. The music was too good.
Muhammad Najmi, guitarist for JEMSON, hit a mean solo in the band’s song “Mekar,” off their 2024 album JSM. He made each step in his progression feel heavy, industrial, before setting off the inevitable demolition that would resurrect the chorus in its wake.
The song builds its hook with returns to a single note, adding tension with each new word set to that anchor. Its lyrics, mostly in Malay, speak of the grind and the beautiful fight against it (and paradoxically at times, alongside it):
Mekar
Biarpun terasa berat
Cuma
Selagi badan tak penat
Menarilah
Coz U deserve that
Rai bersama
Selama usia
Or, in English:
Bloom
Even though it feels heavy
Just
As long as your body isn’t tired
Dance
Coz U deserve that
Let’s celebrate together
For as long as you live
The music video for “Mekar” features a dad who works hard as a delivery motorbike rider to support his daughter. For this JEMSON protagonist, money is more than a number. It’s bread, stability, a living in every sense of the word.
When the crowd screamed for an encore, Najmi tried to reason with the frenzied fans. Didn’t they all have an afterparty to get to?
“I think that’s more important,” he said with a grin.
The fans giggled. He had that lead guitar charm. But they didn’t let up their demands, so JEMSON gave them a couple more bangers to rattle around in their brains for days to come.
The crowd leaned over the amps, waving and singing along. The dance floor got hectic. The bands were working hard, playing hard, and folding the two activities into a perfect mess. At street level, it was another night in Gwangju. Down below, geography itself was warping from the divine distortions of the punk underground.
