In 2012 The Hitchhiker released debut album Insatiable Curiosity and got it praised by the music lovers that found it. A few experimental releases later, now known as POPE X POPE, the band successfully finished crowdfunding its first full-length album under the new name. Intriguing material is to be expected for sure, and the same can be said of the band.

 
What does the name POPE X POPE symbolize? How is it different from The Hitchhiker?

The idea regarded with the name ‘POPE X POPE’ actually came out from Francis Bacon’s obsessive works of the papal theme paintings, we have been deeply attracted to the pictures of these as an iconic distillation of power with religious sacredness, and somehow we thought it quite contradictory in its expression and our works have sort of theses aspects as well. Truly our music have been matured since the time of ‘The Hitchhiker’.

 
You put out the EP Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils in February and it appears to already be unavailable. What are those that did not pick it up missing out on?

First of all we put out EP Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils to find out what listeners think of our latest works before our full-length double album The Divinity and the Flames of Furious Desires release, and most tracks in EP will be included in double album except for the track “Apparition of Flea”. EP Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils will soon be available again.

 
What can listeners expect from The Divinity and the Flames of Furious Desires?

In fact, many of our works in procedure, we owe to the power of coincidence and intuition. We hope listeners trust their own moment of intuition and use it with active while listening. We recommend listeners to see the whole album rather than just focusing on individual tracks, we wanted the sound and images as linked to one colossal moving picture drawn in listener’s mind.

We think our music is rather more aesthetically touches fit in ‘Romantic’, which was personally usual source of inspiration for our works, It becomes more apparent when you find Romantic motif used in this album, (ex. William Blake, Sublimity, Religious Sacrament) even some tracks are directly inspired from the painting like “Satan Smiting Jon With Sore Boils” by William Blake and the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. If you feel the association of these motifs, you will be more empathy in our album The Divinity and the Flames of Furious Desires.

 
You have already done some very interesting work together with Odaeri. Are there any other artists, international or Korean, that you would like to collaborate with?

We’ve always wanted to collaborate with other artists, and already have done several collaborations like music score for the short film The Metamorphosis by director Kinam Yun (officially invited from many International film festival and won the prize include Edinburgh, Moscow Film Festival, here is noteworthy review of the short film The Metamorphosis on David Bordwell’s website on cinema, observations on film art & review by Andrew Robertson, EYE FOR FILM. “Escalation of novelty, not to deny that it is a masterpiece“) and already you mentioned we’ve done work together with Odaeri Study After Bacon’s Triptych Of Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion as part of an exhibition held at SEMA (Seoul Museum of Art).

We also already talked with the band Glittering Blackness, Fall (personally great fan of this band) about the collaboration, we really would like to proceed this collaboration soon. For the international artists, we think a collaboration with Xiu Xiu or Sunn O))) would be interesting.

The album release show for The Divinity and the Flames of Furious Desires will take place at Veloso on April 10th with Jambinai as guests. Jambinai always deliver, and judging by the performance from the Record Fair at Salon Badabie so does POPE X POPE.