Australian pop star looks to build a community in Korea

Will Hyde / Courtesy of Steph Pederson

By Jon Dunbar

Australian pop singer and podcaster Will Hyde turned 23 last week. He spent his birthday in Korea, working on a song he plans to pitch to K-pop rock band Xdinary Heroes.

"We had some great dinners the nights before; I felt very grateful for those, and then just worked," he told The Korea Times, Monday.

"A big part of forming relationships with artists here is going out and having dinner and chatting, and I think that's a really refreshing way to get your feet into collaboration and to understand them," he observed. "In America and Australia, it's very different, like you just hop straight into the studio. At least (here) you have everyone on board before you even enter the room, so that's actually a lot nicer because it saves everyone time."

He arrived in Korea Aug. 20 for a short visit, and leaves this Wednesday for Los Angeles where he plans to continue his career. All his belongings are traveling with him, and he brought along a whole bunch of stuffed koalas to give out to the people he meets.

As well as giving koalas to Xdinary Heroes, he's met with K-pop and indie musicians, as well as producers, reps at entertainment companies and other businesses. He also got work done on two songs with singer-songwriter LEEBADA, titled "Dreaming of the Devil" and "she got it."

He's also been searching for more guests for his podcast "Really Mental," which deals mainly with mental health issues, and said he's invited composer NIve, synth-pop band Glen Check and R&B singer Jiselle.

Will Hyde, third from left, poses with members of Xdinary Heroes during his visit to Korea. / Courtesy of Aaliyah Chae

This trip was a long time in the making, as Hyde has been hoping to come to Korea for quite a while.

It was last October that he was given a big breakthrough into the country when K-pop group Stray Kids member Bang Chan livestreamed Hyde's song "misfit."

"I was watching a movie with my mom on the couch, I don't know what movie, probably something with Leonardo DiCaprio because I love him and I got a DM from someone saying 'Bang Chan played your song,'" Hyde recollected.

According to Hyde's U.S. manager Sky McElroy, one of three co-founders of US-based boutique artist partnership company Pack., who was accompanying Hyde in Korea, the livestream was the result of a lot of work in advance, which paid off following a fan meeting event.

"It was a confluence of events," McElroy said. "K-pop does this really cool thing to encourage vinyl sales, where if you buy the vinyl you get entered into a raffle to meet them. And it just so happened that one of the fans that won the raffle, as a stroke of luck, was also a fan of Will Hyde. So Bang Chan asked her what she was listening to and she said Will Hyde and he said 'I hadn't heard that, so I'll play it on my livestream.'"

"And then from there it just created this ripple effect in terms of getting support in Korea," Hyde added. "I think sometimes you put yourself in the right area and then things will happen from there. That's why I don't call it a coincidence because we were trying to do more stuff here. So I'm here for meetings and to collaborate and I plan to come back a lot in the future as well. I really want to build a community here and that takes time."

Will Hyde visits Meta Korea, where he is served a birthday cake courtesy of Orchard Korea. / Courtesy of Will Hyde

By the time of Bang Chan's livestream, Hyde's music had already been played on Korean radio and being made into lyric videos on YouTube with Korean translations.

"I always like to say that you build to it, right?" McElroy said. "If Will hadn't been doing the work in Australia and the U.S. to build his market and the song wasn't on (Australian public radio station) Triple J Unearthed, then that fan would have never heard the song."

"It just showed the power of the Stray Kids fandom, the STAY fam," Hyde said, referring to the official fan club of the JYP Entertainment act.

Maybe taking a page from the K-pop playbook, Hyde has his own fandom, the Angel Misfits.

"It was originally the Angel Circle, however after this 'Misfit' song started taking off more, I got exposed to a lot of new supporters that really resonated with the song, so we made it Angel Misfits," he said. "So they choose one when they sign up, which one they want to be. You're either an angel or a misfit."

His publicist confirmed that the fan club features roughly even numbers of angels and misfits, although Hyde himself expressed hope that the angels would outnumber the misfits, saying he knows how hard it can be to go through life as the latter.

Will Hyde pays a visit to Musinsa Fashion Next 2022 in Seoul Forest Garden while wearing Givenchy. / Courtesy of Musinsa

Hyde began his music career at age 15, performing in the electronic duo SYDE and by 18 he achieved over 100 million global streams and nearly 1 million monthly listeners.

"We had lots of success, very grateful and we did a bunch of touring and had a lot of awesome opportunities but I felt really unfulfilled and unhappy during that time and really just empty," he admitted. "And so from that experience in 2018, I felt lots of anxiety and depression. I started looking around and I didn't really see any artists, particularly at that time, that I could really relate to in terms of their music or that they were feeling the same way. So I left the group and decided to start writing this project because I really wanted to literally become that for other people and offer that space and community."

This has been his "guiding purpose," he said, "that sort of guided everything I do," as seen in many of his songs, including "misfit." and "dark until september.," which he says are all about dealing with mental health.

His next song, "Kiss Me Before You Go," a duet with Canadian singer-songwriter Jess Benko set for release on Sept. 14, is also about dealing with loss and bereavement.

"There's some things that I feel like I can say better in a song but sometimes a conversation is the most effective way to talk about it," he said. "And so the podcast is an extension of that to build out that world and help people understand more."

He said that in one of the early episodes of the podcast, Heyoon Jeong of global pop group Now United, helped open his eyes to Korea's own complex mental health situation, although he chose to look for common ground rather than fixating on cultural differences.

"We're all just humans, there's this struggle that's happening, particularly amongst younger people. We should have the right means to talk about things and feel comfortable because we feel these things, so why is it wrong to do that?" he said.

"After we did that episode, it charted here for the podcast and we noted that, so I think that maybe that's a sign that people are wanting to speak it about more. I think it's becoming more of a conversation. Hopefully, through talking with these K-pop artists and indie artists here as well, we can continue to just bring that to more people in the world and I really want to speak to more Korean artists on the podcast."