Korean Boyfriend - Not About Space [EP]

“They Might Be Giants… nastier… but with a smile.”­- Jim DeRogatis – Sound Opinions

“Catchy, wonky, new wave-influenced art-rock.”– Bandcamp

“A restlessness and intelligence that transcends its pop-culture disposability.” – Hobart Rowland – Magnet

Not About Space (May 2026), is a four song EP, that’s both straightforward and enigmatic. Although arrangements use laser guns and retro-futuristic synths, it is grounded on earth, where Korean Boyfriend looks no further to see the unknown, the ugly and the sublime. His earth is specifically Manhattan, where there is a lack of space but never wanting in laughter and conflict. Not explicitly a concept album, the four songs are nevertheless tied together, ending with Number Four, a song that alludes to corporate sectors or “spaces” that shroud themselves in abstraction while counting to four, the number that is superstitiously avoided in Asian cultures as a symbol of death, which is definitively not about space.

Frontman, writer, and producer Stanley Cho grew up among C-41 chemicals and film canisters in his parents’ North Hollywood photo lab. An abstract tapestry of Los Angeles, woven of Asians, gangs, Guitar Center, Japanese cars, TV/Nintendo, and obscure films undergirds his work. As a youth, he transformed his parents’ Korean community church worship team into a Screamo band. Cho played with a variety of bands over the years, mostly punk related, touring many a tattoo parlor parking lot, and the typical LA rock clubs for local acts—Whisky, Cobalt Cafe, the original Mr. T’s. (He was once called the Asian Jimi Hendrix after a show at the Garage.)

Korean Boyfriend (aka KBf, KBEEF, K🐝F, K🥩) began as a parody K-Pop band but, informed by his new home of New York City, soon evolved into a conceptual framework existing only to nurture the aspect of play. No prerequisite was required to enjoy the gritty overdrive, warm analogue synths, and pretty melodies of his debut LP YELLOW. Set in a familiar context of quotidian pop-cultural references and pop music, necessarily tweaked by an outside point of view, the songs on YELLOW touched upon themes related to cultural institutions, fine art, Asian American insecurities, and punk nostalgia.

With KBf’s sophomore full-length, Simple Face, Cho expanded his palette with additional vintage synths, pedals and a new bass guitar, leading to arrangements more direct in approach with concise statements of intent, of darker gothic undertones, but with the same deadpan humor; imbued with both the energy and ephemeral sense of fatigue that comes from existing in a gleaming, teeming, dirty megalopolis.

All instrumentation, production, recording, and mixing was done by Cho.