Kim Dong-ryul

This song, from Exhibition's debut album produced by Shin Hae-chul, introduced the voice of twenty-year-old Kim Dong-ryul. When the album appeared in the 2012 film “Architecture 101,” it reached another generation as well.

• Over a plain, piano-led accompaniment rests Kim Dong-ryul's low, thick voice (baritone range). His way of singing, conveying feeling through crisp, deliberate diction rather than ornament, was already in place here.
• Seo Dong-wook's bass never steps forward; it holds things up from below. The spare two-man lineup comes through in the sound itself.
• A ballad from the mid-1990s, when analog recording was giving way to digital. The texture of keyboard-made strings filling the empty space seems to summon that era.
• Its way of calmly retracing bygone days and longing in the first person is the basic stance that runs through most of his later lyrics.

A Carnival song made with Lee Juck in the year Exhibition wound down. It is the sound of Kim Dong-ryul, until then a man of ballads, colliding with a musician of a different grain, and it brought him a Golden Disc main prize.

• Underneath runs a rhythm from Black music (funk) that sets the body moving with choppy guitar and bass. It is the groove furthest from Kim Dong-ryul's solo ballads.
• The team of American brass arranger Jerry Hey is said to have worked on the album. The accompaniment of brass instruments stabbing at the rhythm in short, clipped hits (a brass section) is well worth a listen.
• Lee Juck's high, sharp timbre and Kim Dong-ryul's low, rounded one trade lines and set each other off.
• It looks back on school days as if talking to an old friend, leaving a nostalgia that never weighs heavy.

The title track of his third album, “Homecoming,” released while he was studying at Berklee. It reached No. 1 on music chart programs, showing that even as a student again he was still close to the public.

• An arrangement that opens on piano, with strings stacking up one layer at a time. The feel for orchestral arranging he was studying at Berklee seems to melt into the ballad.
• The opening (verse) is sung low, almost spoken, and toward the refrain (chorus) the strings thicken and the voice rises too. It is a form built to let emotion swell little by little.
• It speaks like a soliloquy, hesitating over whether to open one's heart again to someone who has gone. In the passages sung as if swallowed rather than shouted, the hesitation comes through.
• A song from the years when the CD was still at the center of the record market. His third album sold more than 260,000 copies, the best-selling of his solo albums.

A song from his fifth album, “Monologue,” which sold more than 100,000 copies in 2008, just as the record market hit bottom. It comes from an album whose lyrics he wrote almost entirely himself.

• In April 2008 it was named song of the month at the Cyworld Digital Music Awards. It stood at the very heart of an era when people set background music on their mini-homepages to show what was in their hearts.
• As the album title suggests, its voice is close to a monologue. Without adornment, it confesses the wish to be honest before love, with no calculation.
• The voice, recorded close over piano and strings, creates an intimacy, as if it were speaking right at your ear.
• It is also said to have been nominated in the Golden Disc digital category. On the threshold of the download era, it is a rare case of a song loved both on record and as a digital track.

Written in the early 2000s and released nearly 10 years later as the title track of a Christmas EP. The moment it came out, it topped the major music charts.

• A long song, running 5 minutes 39 seconds. Within a single song it changes key (modulation) several times, pushing the pitch upward, and with each change the emotion climbs one more level.
• A grand arrangement with an orchestral accompaniment wrapping the whole song, it takes the opposite road from the short, hook-repeating songs on the music charts of the day.
• As the title suggests, it rewinds the scenes of a past love and plays them back again. The more the memories return, the stronger the voice grows.
• He promoted this album through concerts rather than broadcasts. Live, the moment the orchestra swells all at once at each key change is considered the song's high point.

The title track of his sixth studio album, “Companion,” it reached number one on eight streaming sites and on the network-television chart shows without a single broadcast appearance. It carries exactly what he said he hoped for: that the same feeling would come through even on a small radio.

• The arrangement is held back so that the melody and lyrics are heard first. His stated aim, to steer clear of fashionable sounds and difficult musical grammar, becomes audible in the sound itself.
• It speaks in the voice of confession, laying the whole of one's heart before the other person with nothing held back. The song turns on the moment in the chorus when hesitation becomes certainty.
• Right after its release it rose to number one on eight real-time charts. It is remembered as the moment, in 2014, when idol music ruled the charts, that drew listeners in their thirties and older back to the streaming sites.
• The actor Gong Yoo appeared in the music video. Here, too, he kept to his way of introducing a song through video and concerts rather than stage appearances.

The title track of the EP he released three years and three months after his sixth album. Gratitude toward the people who wait for whatever comes next runs beneath the whole record as its prevailing mood.

• It was recorded in England with the London Symphony Orchestra, a partnership renewed for the first time since his second album, “Hope.” You can hear the deep resonance that only a real full string section produces.
• As the title suggests, it speaks in the second person, as if answering someone's letter. Its grain differs from that of his earlier songs, which were often monologues.
• The morning after its release it topped the real-time charts on seven streaming sites, and the other tracks lined up side by side near the top.
• The actor Hyun Bin appeared in the music video.