Peggy Gou Announces Debut Album I Hear You, Shares Single '1+1=11'

Today, artist, producer, DJ and cultural trailblazer Peggy Gou announces details of her long-awaited debut album. One of the most hotly-anticipated debut records in recent years, I Hear You will be released on June 7 via XL Recordings. The ten track album is the culmination of years of work for the Korean-born artist, who’s uniquely revered as both an underground icon and global sensation, sticking by her own unwavering vision to become one of the most in-demand electronic music artists and DJs in the world. Featuring previous singles, the 2023 chart-topping global hit “(It Goes Like) Nanana” and her Lenny Kravitz collaboration “I Believe in Love Again”, the LP sees Gou stepping into the next level of her artistry and boldly claiming her voice through the kaleidoscopic lens of ‘90s house music.

Talking about I Hear You, Peggy Gou says:

“I Hear You is more than just my debut album. It embodies countless hours of dedication in my journey to create something timeless, and is a testament to the power of listening, to ourselves and to each other.”

To celebrate news of the album, Peggy Gou today releases a new single “1+1=11”, a festival-sized anthem that signifies “togetherness” and is set to unify dancefloors around the world. “1+1=11” is accompanied by the first-ever music video from acclaimed Icelandic-Danish artist, and Gou’s longtime friend, Olafur Eliasson. The video is directed by and stars Eliasson, whose globally-renowned work – including The weather project (2003), The New York City Waterfalls (2008) and Ice Watch (2014) – has often been inspired by natural systems, embodied experience and also movement, a disciplines he fell in love with as a teenage breakdancer. The video was premiered in Berlin last night at a party hosted by Gou, featuring a personally-curated DJ line up that included Spray, fka.m4a, and Matrefakt. See footage of the party here.

Speaking about the “1+1=11” video, Eliasson says:

“Dance is transformative! It bends and reshapes our relationship with time and space. When I was a teenager, breakdancing changed my life. I was into popping, moving like a robot, and doing the electric boogie. Street dance enabled me to explore the space of my body in relation to the world around me. I came to realise that by moving, I could change space. I could change what I saw and what I sensed. And these experiences actually proved foundational for my later artistic work.

Sculpture and dance are both non-verbal languages. Sometimes in order to communicate, you simply have to move. That’s what happened when I first met Peggy. We were having lunch, talking about our shared interests in psychosonics, rhythm, and movement, and to show her the moves I was talking about, I stood up in the restaurant to dance. I was thrilled that she later asked me to dance on video for one of her upcoming releases and to develop the visual language for it. By bringing together dance – embodied exploration of space – with colourful shadows, lights, and mirrors, I was able to bring some of the key interests that have long shaped my art into an entirely new context. Working together has been rewarding and a lot of fun!”

The “1+1=11” video is one of three I Hear You collaborations between Gou and Eliasson. The striking album cover artwork features Gou wearing the artwork Psychoacoustic empathy amp (2023) - a “ring of ears” created by Eliasson. Meanwhile, on the futuristic call-to-arms album opener “Your Art”, Gou recites her own edit of Eliasson’s “Your planet seen from within” poem, written to accompany his 2022 TIME magazine cover story. Elsewhere, a second vocal collaboration comes courtesy of Puerto Rican rap sensation Villano Antillano while Gou, the album’s main performer, writer, producer and mixer, lends her own signature vocals throughout it all. The result is an album that cements Peggy Gou’s position as a true cultural pioneer, at once nostalgic yet electrifyingly forward thinking.

Meanwhile, 2024 is set to be a huge year in the live arena for Peggy Gou. Having played to over a million people in 2023, she already has high-profile appearances lined up at the likes of the Glastonbury, Coachella and Primavera festivals alongside her biggest headline show to date, at London’s Gunnersbury Park, on 17th August. For full details head to https://peggygou.com/tour

About Peggy Gou:

Peggy Gou is uniquely revered as both underground icon and global sensation, sticking by her own unwavering vision to become one of the most in-demand electronic musicians and DJs in the world. Having performed to over a million people worldwide in 2023, the self-managed South Korean-born, Berlin-based producer and artist has blazed her own trail as the first Korean DJ to play Berghain, the first female DJ to headline Ushuaïa Ibiza’s closing party and the first woman in over 20 years to appear within the Top 10 of DJ Mag’s annual Top 100 list.

Since 2016, she’s forged a singular blend of club music that’s as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic, finding her global breakthrough with 2018’s Once EP, which birthed hits like “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” and “Han Jan.” An essential tastemaker, she runs her music and design label Gudu, through which she issued her 2019 critically acclaimed Moment EP, designs her acclaimed Peggy Goods fashion line, and sold out her own London Pleasure Gardens festival for four consecutive years. 2024 will see her biggest ever headline London show when she performs to 25,000 people in Gunnersbury Park in August.

She’s collaborated with everyone from house legend Maurice Fulton (2020’s “Jigoo”) to South Korean counterculture hero OHHYUK (2021’s “Nabi”), and was enlisted for a 2022 remix of Kylie Minogue’s iconic “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Referred to as “coolest DJ in the world” by Rolling Stone, Gou has graced the cover of Vogue Germany, Vanity Fair Italia, GQ Middle East and Korea, Harper’s Bazaar Malaysia, and others, while boasting collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Mont Blanc and Samsung to name just a few.

She made 2023’s international song of the summer with “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” which topped singles charts in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Greece, as well as the Billboard Dance Airplay chart. The balmy club hit appears on her highly anticipated debut album I Hear You, which arrives in June on XL Recordings. Also featuring her Lenny Kravitz collaboration “I Believe in Love Again,” the LP sees Gou boldly claiming her voice through the kaleidoscopic lens of ‘90s house music.

About Olafur Eliasson

The works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community.

Eliasson is internationally renowned for his works that challenge the way we perceive and interact with our environment. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project, an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, which was seen by more than two million people.

Eliasson continually explores the ways in which movement can be integrated into his works to create dynamic environments, with pieces that invite viewers to engage with both the space and themselves in unexpected ways. In Movement microscope (2011), Eliasson invited a group of dancers to conduct a form of spatio-temporal intervention during a normal workday at his studio in Berlin. In 2012, Eliasson created a set design for Tree of codes, a ballet by renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor based on Jonathan Safran Foer's book of the same name. The set, which featured a series of reflective panels that distorted and fragmented the dancers' movements, added a mesmerising visual dimension to McGregor's choreography. Eliasson's engagement with dance and movement extends into projects such as Your embodied garden (2013), where he partnered with choreographer Steen Koerner to explore traditional Chinese gardens as models for physical movement, duration, flow, and rhythm. Their collaboration continued in 2015, when Koerner performed around Eliasson’s artwork Ice watch, a circle of twelve glacial ice blocks installed in Paris's Place du Panthéon to draw attention to Arctic ice melting. On another occasion, Eliasson invited dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet to improvise a dance around the piece as well.

Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.

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