wave to earth Shows ‘bad pieces’
Today, South Korean indie rock band wave to earth release their much-anticipated new album, bad pieces. Watch the music video for single “courage”.
The album marks a new chapter and creative shift for the trio—Daniel Kim, John Cha, and Dong Q—as they experiment with new instruments and their sound, the process ultimately leading them to discover more about themselves individually and as a band.
“We studied a lot of records from the past, and we wanted to incorporate the sounds and the instruments used on those records. As we started using these new sounds, we felt like, apart from them feeling analog, they bring a certain type of inspiration,” Kim says. “Sonically, it’s about establishing a new sound for wave to earth,” Cha continues, “We were talking about how, maybe, we can’t do what that we did before, because that sound was already out there.”
bad pieces finds a band walking away from the formula that made them, in order to grow up. wave to earth built a global audience on lo-fi jazz. On bad pieces, they set that sound down at the exact moment it was working best. The band doesn’t frame this as a reinvention, the trio call it the record that sounds most like who they actually are just now.
This pivot comes off a peak, not a plateau with 100+ shows across 2024 and 2025, 29 sold-out US dates, and three nights at Olympic Hall gone in under a minute. Their 2023 song “bad” hit No. 1 on Spotify’s Global Viral 50 and their 2020 track “seasons” crossed 500 million streams. Their new sound on bad pieces gets tested immediately, at the largest scale of their career.
wave to earth will launch an extensive global tour this fall— “the pieces tour,” promoted by Live Nation, will begin September 4 in Vancouver, with stops in 21 cities across North America including Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin and more, with stops at New York City’s iconic Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre.
The tour will also see shows in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and more across Asia this November. Complete list of dates below.
The trio debuted in 2019 and have gone on to captivate a global audience—selling out shows across North America, Europe, and Asia. Their latest single “heaven and hell” is the first taste of new music since play with earth! 0.03 (2024). The EP debuted at #5 on Spotify’s Top Albums Debut Global Chart and found the band on a fully sold-out tour across North America.
They have released EPs wave 0.01 (2020) and summer flows 0.02 (2020), and their first full-length album, 0.1 flaws and all (2023) arrived following signing to independent label, WAVY. The much-lauded album included breakout single “bad” which soared to #1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 Global Chart. The band has gone on to accumulate over 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, more than 500 million streams of their hit “seasons,” and perform hundreds of shows around the world, including Lollapalooza in Chicago, Chile and India.