Beautiful World

A door left open to a room you cannot leave

Most albums open by inviting you in. "Beautiful World" opens by letting you overhear someone who has been alone for a long time. The first track of Parannoul's 2021 record arrives as a wall of fuzz, with guitars piled so high that the voice underneath sounds like it is shouting up through floorboards. The title promises something gentle, and the song spends five minutes testing whether that promise can be believed.

It is a strange kind of anthem. It is loud, melodic and built to be sung along to, yet it keeps pointing at the person singing as the problem. The song belongs to a record about wanting to be better, wanting to be seen, and being unable to leave the room where those wants pile up.

Where the song comes from

Parannoul is the solo project of an anonymous musician from Seoul, who has said that very few people in their real life know the music exists.^[1] To See the Next Part of the Dream was released on Bandcamp on 23 February 2021, the second album under the name, after earlier work under the alias laststar and a 2020 debut.^[1] It was recorded over several years on a single old computer, with almost every instrument supplied by software and the vocals captured on an old smartphone.^[1]

That origin is not trivia. It is the sound of the song. Most of the album is mixed at clipping levels, a choice Parannoul has linked to the influence of the band Nouns, and the voice sits low in the mix.^[1] The effect is of music made in a small room at a volume the neighbors might not appreciate, which is precisely the situation the lyrics describe.

Parannoul has framed the album in an artist statement as being about a person whose body is that of an adult while the mind remains a child, because the distance between ideal and reality is so wide.^[2] The same statement says the record documents feelings from roughly the previous three years, including delusion, inferiority and escapism, and offers no promise that things will get better.^[2] In a later interview, Parannoul described making the music without any thought of popularity as a kind of healing, and described the album's protagonist as someone who spent his youth dreaming and now has to face reality.^[5]

The protagonist and his gap

KEXP, working from a translation of the Korean lyrics, reads the song as the opening of a larger story: a self-doubting young man who wishes his weakness would disappear, and who senses that the people who mattered to him now live only in memory.^[4] The same piece describes the album's lead character as a fictional 21-year-old aspiring musician with a child's mindset who cannot really play guitar.^[4]

That description clarifies a lot. The narrator of "Beautiful World" is not a rock star mourning a breakup. He is someone who has built an entire inner life around an ideal self, and who measures every day against it. The "beautiful world" of the title can be read as the one he believes he ought to be living in, the one that his dreams, his media and his memories keep promising.

The gap between that world and the actual one is the engine of the track. It pushes the verses toward confession and the choruses toward release, and then it pulls everything back toward doubt. KEXP calls the result an homage to the push and pull of youth, the feeling of wanting to be more than you are while the goal stays just out of reach.^[4]

Nostalgia as a hiding place

A second theme is retreat into the past. The album's own description is of an adult who dreams about the past while denying the present.^[1] This is where the Japanese media that surround the record come in. Its imagery and samples draw on early 2000s works including All About Lily Chou-Chou, Welcome to the N.H.K. and Goodnight Punpun, all stories about isolated young people who build private worlds because the shared one feels unlivable.^[1][2]

The opening track makes this explicit. Parannoul has confirmed that "Beautiful World" samples dialogue from All About Lily Chou-Chou.^[5] The film is about teenagers who find their only sense of belonging in an online fan community devoted to a singer, and it treats that belonging as both a lifeline and a trap. Placing a fragment of it at the very start tells the listener which tradition this album belongs to: the art of the lonely, made for the lonely.

The album title adds another layer. It comes from a line in the manga Hoshikuzu Nina, and it implies waiting for the next installment of something that may never arrive.^[1][5] The dream here is not sleep. It is the long, comfortable story a person tells about their own future so that they do not have to act in the present.

Noise as honesty

The sound itself is a thematic argument. Reviewers have heard the lineage of shoegaze, from Slowdive and Ride to My Bloody Valentine, in the layered guitars and buried vocals.^[3] The Korean critic Joon Hwan Jang specifically compared the opening track's sound to My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow."^[1] Pitchfork's Ian Cohen pointed to the lyrics of this song as an example of the album's melodramatic side.^[1]

That melodrama is worth defending. Adolescent feeling is melodramatic because everything is at stake and nothing is yet proven. The track does not try to ironize this. Fuzzed guitars crash against busy, almost math-rock drum patterns, and the emo-style riffs and sung hooks keep reaching for a climax.^[4] KEXP described the effect as loud and catchy at once, with distortion carrying the melody rather than hiding it.^[4]

The low vocal mix also does emotional work. When the singer is barely audible over the instruments, the song sounds like a confession that the narrator is not sure he wants anyone to hear. Consequence's review made a similar point, arguing that the focus is on atmosphere and catharsis rather than on vocal polish, and that the homemade production feels humane rather than limited.^[3]

The invisible audience

There is an irony that surrounds the song. The album was written by someone who calls themself just a student writing music in a bedroom, and who closed the Bandcamp statement by hoping the world would hold more "active losers" like them.^[2] The record then spread widely. It was picked up by critics, reached the front page of Rate Your Music, and topped that site's 2021 chart.^[1] Stereogum noted how little coverage it had received before that point, observing that the album had received almost no coverage beyond a podcast episode before critics took notice.^[2]

Parannoul has said elsewhere that they felt the attention was exaggerated.^[1] That reaction suits the music. A song about the distance between a private ideal and a public reality was suddenly heard by thousands, and the artist's first response was embarrassment rather than triumph. The narrator of "Beautiful World" would probably have reacted the same way.

Consequence also read the album against a backdrop of Korean musicians who faded into obscurity, seeing its own rise from Bandcamp anonymity as a counterpoint to that fate.^[3] Whether or not the artist intended it, the song's cultural weight comes partly from this: it gave a language and a volume to people who felt that no one was listening.

Other ways to hear it

It is possible to hear the title ironically, as a sneer at how the world is described by those who do not suffer in it. Under that reading the song is a protest against forced cheer, and the roaring guitars are an answer to it. Another reading is more tender: the narrator does believe the world is beautiful, and his misery is precisely that he cannot find his way into it.

A third approach treats the track as pure scene-setting. As the first song on a concept album, it introduces a character and a mood, and its meaning grows only as the later tracks answer it. Heard that way, "Beautiful World" is a question, and the rest of the album, which includes a ten-minute epic and a song about youthful rebellion,^[1] is the long, unresolved reply.

None of these readings cancel each other out. The song carries both hope and bitterness because the narrator does too, and the music refuses to settle the argument.

Why it keeps resonating

The song works because it makes a specific kind of shame audible. Many listeners know the feeling of having a rich imaginary life and a stalled real one, and of being embarrassed by the distance between them. Parannoul does not offer a way out. The artist has said the album does not promise improvement.^[2] What it offers instead is company.

The sound is the reason this feels like company and not just misery. Every layer of fuzz is a reminder that someone sat alone and built this, and that they made it beautiful anyway. In that sense the title may be earnest after all. The world in the song is not the one outside the window. It is the one that gets made when a person with a broken guitar technique, a cheap phone microphone and nothing to lose turns the volume all the way up.