Written by Samantha Firmin | April 20, 2026

Earlier this month, dream pop band Phoebe Rings made their way from Auckland, New Zealand to Seoul, South Korea to embark on their second Asia tour. Following their Asia Pop Festival appearance last year, the band returned with greater familiarity and new ambition to headline their first show as part of WANDERLOCH’s ‘SPOT THE GIG’ series.

Ahead of the performance, Nopality caught up with all four members, Crystal Choi (vocals, keys), Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent (guitar, synth), Benjamin Locke (bass), and Alex Freer (drums), to talk about their return to Asia, evolving creative processes, new music in the works, and life on tour.

(responses have been edited for clarity)

Since touring Asia last year, how does it feel to be back in Seoul, especially for the band’s first headlining show?

Simeon: Strangely normal, I think. I was surprised, I was like, “Oh yeah, I recognize a lot of this.”

Alex: Less overwhelming and kind of comfortable. The temperature is a lot kinder.

Crystal: It hasn't actually been a year yet, which makes it feel more familiar for all of us.

Simeon: I think, at the end of last year, we did 31 shows in six weeks. So I think the playing part feels less scary than last time, and it just feels really easy to play a show these days.

How does this Asia tour feel different from the previous one?

Crystal: We have just started it, so we're about to experience the difference, but the season definitely is different and the familiarity is different.

Ben: We'll be going to a few new places in Japan, and to the Philippines, which is exciting. I feel like the first time you enter a place on tour, you're constantly puzzle-solving or trying to get around obstacles and figure things out, so it's been a lot more relaxed.

Simeon: It feels like we could do it again, like a third time. The first time it was like, what if this is the only time we ever do this? It felt like such an impossible thing to happen. Now it's like, “Oh, this is something we want to focus on and do again and build relationships here.” It feels way more achievable, whereas last time it was kind of like a dream. It feels a lot more like we can break ground here.

Crystal: It might just be me, but I think I'm getting more pressured to do well. I think last time it was just “a dream.” We were also playing at a festival, so the audience is kind of guaranteed in a way. Now it's kind of like, if we know that we want to keep doing this we need to do a really great job, so people will want us to come here.

Phoebe Rings Crystal | Photos by Samantha Firmin

Crystal, how does it feel getting to play in your hometown and a culture that physically you grew up away from, but were still very much a part of?

Crystal: It's so funny, because my mother tongue is Korean, I'm used to being around Koreans of course, and I've come to Korea a lot, but I'm still getting used to the gig culture or the show culture of Korea. It's really great, but it still doesn't feel the most familiar. So it's all a learning process. The staff and everyone are super polite and they're always right beside you to help you. That’s been really cool and I’m just in the process of getting used to it.

As you all were preparing for this tour, how did you curate the setlist?

Simeon: I think every tour is different and I think the last tour we were on opening slots, so it was only 30 minutes. We had a lot of songs to pick from, whereas tonight we're playing for over an hour, so we're using most of our songs. Tonight we're playing most of our songs versus just having to pick normally. The consideration goes into what songs flow into each other well, but not so much about which ones we pick or leave. I think tonight's a really good opportunity for us to play all of them. Funnily enough, when you look at the analytics on Apple Music or Spotify, you can see some songs are really popular in some areas, which is really weird. So maybe that would be a reason to play something or not play something. Sometimes we’re just like, “We haven’t played this in a while, we should do it tonight.”

Ben: Or it’s, “We haven't played this a few times, let's not do it.”

Phoebe Rings Ben | Photos by Samantha Firmin

How do live arrangements differ from the recordings? Do you tend to prefer one over the other?

Ben: With the first album, there were a lot of Crystal's BVs (Background Vocals) that kind of got substituted for live. Also there are things we just don't have the budget to facilitate on these performances, like our strings. What Crystal does is she tries to emulate some of that stuff.

Crystal: Yes, take that arrangement to be played on our keys. I'm getting a feeling that I might prefer this new cover song over the recorded version. I like the recorded version, but we did work on it at a very fast pace. So I think if we keep playing this song, I have a feeling that it will become even more polished. Also some songs have a very exciting energy to them. I feel like the song “Cheshire” brings a really nice energy.

Simeon: I think there's a funny thing where sometimes you start playing the song live and you just do the best version you can, and then you play it like 60 more times and it’s completely different. Even though it’s not intended, you just get more comfortable and it overtime slowly changes. I think the funniest one is probably “Ocean.” There's no recording of it; it only exists live, but the live version we do now, you can definitely hear that we've played it in a lot more. It feels like sometimes we're scrambling to learn something in time for a show. When you have songs that have had 60 shows and you play a new one, it’s a really funny feeling.

Phoebe Rings has released two official covers, “Through the Hidden Hours” and “Astronaut.” How did you choose which songs to cover, and is there anything you're considering when reinterpreting these songs and adding your own flavor into it?

Crystal: We originally wanted one of them to be a song in Korean and one in English. For the Korean song, because I grew up listening to Korean music I felt more comfortable choosing it. Also I really like Yoon Sang. He's a really great composer who worked with really amazing artists. The sentiment around this song is about your childhood memory, which stuck with me.

Alex: We chose “Astronaut” because Beach House is on the same label we signed to in the States. We were thinking it would be cool to do an artist from Car Park and we all talked about that. We also all really like that Beach House era. Covers are kind of hard as well because you’re trying to do something different, look at it in a different lens, arrange it slightly differently, or see if you can find other melodies in the song. It's really hard to approach it differently. For the first few times we've covered songs we ended up playing it very faithful to the original, but I think we're getting better at finding the process. It's really hard.

Crystal: I think it became slightly easier after we started playing with each other more because we found our sonic palette and limitations. For those ones we mainly used Juno, which is the synthesizer we used for the first album. We said, “Let’s just create some sounds with that and then combine it with us doing our normal thing.” I think it made it similar, but not too much.

Individually, what do you think each of you bring to the table when it comes to creating your work?

Ben: Should we answer it for the person directly opposite of us?

What is something another member brings to the table when it comes to creating your work?

Simeon: Yes. We'll do a reverse alphabetical order.

I think that if you're not a musician it feels like bass parts are not the most important part of a song, and they often are, or they have the scope to make something really different. I think Ben is very good at some very lovely, sparkly things, and a bass shouldn't really be able to sparkle like that. There's some really tasteful and considered things that aren’t overplaying, which I think is another trap that people fall into. It’s been really fun recording some new songs and I feel like the EP was recorded differently than the first album, and differently than how we're recording now. So it’s nice to see these things happening in real time and see how Ben's process kind of comes together.

Phoebe Rings Simeon | Photos by Samantha Firmin

Ben: I feel like we should do this before every show.

Besides the great hairstyles and fashion that everybody adores, Simeon has great taste in sonic textures and arrangements. We all have slightly different intuitions or ways of thinking about music and structuring it. I think everyone brings these things to the table that the other person wouldn't necessarily do as their first choice. It’s a really wonderful thing to experience. Simeon can just play everything as well and always catches my marakah when I throw it across the stage.

Crystal: Alex is the best drummer that I know. He knows how to play the drums to the best of the arrangement and prioritizes the song first. I think that's a really amazing strength that a lot of drummers don't have. I think it goes for every one of us as well. We don’t try and show off our instrumental skills that much, but Alex is definitely the epitome of that. Also he has a very deep knowledge of all of the instruments. When it comes to arrangement, he has amazing ears for what could happen. In our collaborative process, we've actually been recording the second album demo at his studio in New Zealand to facilitate that. He comes up with suggestions and knows what drum fill to play straight away, basically kind of tuning in with everyone's taste, and that's been very integral.

Alex: Crystal is extremely passionate about the band. A driving force. A lot of admin, too much admin, takes on a lot herself. She has an amazing sense of harmony and melody that is just of the natural world, and her arrangements just flow. Music comes out of her very naturally, and I think we all gravitate towards that because we all can feel that from her.

Considering the band has been in the studio a lot, are there any processes or moments that have particularly stood out?

Alex: Recording this new stuff together has been really, really fun, because it's been the most collaborative. When you work together on something, you never know how to approach it. The first EP was just Crystal, and the album was like, “How do we do this?” Then this new stuff has been, “Let’s try these new ways of working it out.” I think when you share a song with someone or write a song that’s in a really early stage, it can be really scary to share it. When we all work together there's a big amount of trust within all of us. Doing the second album has made it more and more clear how much of a very special relationship there is between us.

Simeon: When you talk about trust and how scary it is, I think during the first album we were kind of making a song and then being like, “Hey band, here's a song, we should record this.” Now this time we're essentially sketching a very simple thing and then being like, “you do the things that you do on the song,” For me especially, sitting at home and not recording, even though I want to hear the whole song is really scary. I think, “This doesn't sound like a Phoebe Rings song,” then the band plays it and it's like, “Oh it is a Phoebe Rings song.” We play it three times and everyone finds their rhythm very quickly.

Balancing four different personalities can be hard, how do you each preserve your individual voices and still remain cohesive?Do you ever find this balance challenging?

Phoebe Rings Alex | Photos by Samantha Firmin

Alex: I think everyone definitely has their own thing. Everyone writes in a very different, distinctive style; it's almost a problem. You want to make an album that sounds like one band, rather than four individuals, but everyone definitely does things differently. I think it's a good challenge. The way we started with the second album was trying to write the song in the most basic way possible, like the melody, lyrics, and chords, and everything else was up for grabs. Even those things, such as the way everyone interprets the most base thing is so different. Everyone definitely has their own voice, which is cool, but it's more important that it's a group. That’s a really valuable thing in this day and age because everyone wants to do things by themselves. We all did solo music beforehand, but I think there's so much power and so much more fun when you do it together and trust other people.

Simeon: It’s almost the opposite issue where we're very individual and we're learning to be as cohesive as we can. I think that's what this version of recording is like. I feel like I'm noticing a lot more this time around that we're more willing to make suggestions for other people's songs. Last time I was like, “Here's the thing,” and we'd just get it done and record it, but now it’s, “What if we did that?” I think we're feeling like we can speak about each other's music and make suggestions.

Crystal: One noticeable thing was the song tempo. It shifted around as we rehearsed a lot. We tried to experiment with it much more, whereas, when we had our demos with the full arrangement ready and showed it to the band, that full form was done and it felt like we had to stick to it.

Ben: There’s so many layers to creating new songs and we all kind of brought the blueprints. If you look at the chord charts, you could probably tell who's who. We all kind of add these things to our parts, like textures or the sounds of our voices and everything on top. I think we all wanted it to sound cohesive. I don't think anybody is ever trying to pull it back from that. We're all moving towards the same goal.

Now that you have confirmed you are recording new stuff, is there anything you want to tease for the fans? What can we expect from the band in the remainder of 2026?

Crystal: I think the remainder of 2026 is going to be doing other little trips to different places, but also we'll try very hard to complete the second album. We've been actually going at it at a pretty aggressive pace. I’m normally a perfectionist, but I was concentrating more on completion and bringing it to the band, so we can perfect it together. We’re trying to get things done, play it live, and tour it around.

Ben: We’ll be playing one of those new songs tonight.

Individually, do you all have any goals or things you wish to achieve within the near future?

Alex: I just want to get the album done.

Ben: It would be great to play some more overseas shows, but I think when you've come off an album, you do have a desire to record more. It’s kind of the most exciting, rewarding thing at the moment.

Crystal: Album.

Simeon: With the album it feels like reading the first chapters of a book, and now I want to see where it ends. Coming here and playing is awesome, but also Ben lives overseas, so we don't have infinite access to being together. We have to partition off where we use that time. It’s always nice to tour because that's guaranteed Ben time. It's nice to have an excuse to get together and go somewhere. I think the first part of recording this album has been very sketchy and getting the ideas down, and the ideas sound so good. My personal favorite part is all the extra things. I'm really excited to see where these extra things take us with these songs, because they're so cool.

Dream Pop is all about creating an atmosphere. Can you paint me a picture of the ideal atmosphere and situation for someone to listen to Aseurai?

Crystal: On a real clear night when there are lots of stars. You're looking up to the stars and you've got some noise- cancelling something on.

Simeon: It's a cold night and you’ve just had a really nice bowl of some kind of soupy noodle, so you’re warm inside.

Ben: And one glass of beer, and maybe there’s a bicycle.

As big foodies, are there any specific dishes you’re hoping to try on tour this time?

Ben: We just had a really good last day of eating. I just want to repeat that. We had great KBBQ last night and really great sushi for lunch.

Crystal: We kicked off so strong. So strong that it's hard to top it.

Simeon: I just wanted to go back to all the places that we went to last time because they were so delicious. I think it will end up being, going to different places to get the same thing. I still haven't had some katsu yet.

Crystal: I would love a real, amazing, satisfying bowl of ramen.

What are three things each of you can’t go without on tour?

Crystal: Noise-cancelling earphones or headphones because when you're on the plane. I would probably have anti-bacterial wet wipes. It's very boring, but it's very necessary. Shit happens. I don't have it this time, so I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but whenever I do go overseas I like to have a slightly different perfume. Smell is really strong when it comes to linking with memories, so when I smell a certain scent, I think about the place.

Simeon: Definitely noise-cancelling headphones for everything. I think we’re very good at chatting together and then also breaking off and just being alone, which is nice. I never feel like there's an obligation for us to get together and do something. Then that would also be the reason why I bring my Switch everywhere I go. Last time we came here, we were playing the Asian Pop Festival and they put us up in a really nice hotel and we had a great evening of Switch with the TV and some soju. For the third thing, I started doing a diary. I don't normally keep a diary, but I do a two-page spread, with a rundown of my day on one page and a drawing of somewhere I was that day on the other. I did bring one. I need to catch up. I didn't do yesterday's, so that one counts if I can commit to it this tour.

Ben: Packing cubes. I feel like I've always been maybe a little bit of a skeptic. My partner really encouraged me to use them and she bought some for me and it’s really good.

Crystal: I told you! We often would do the laundry together or share a suitcase. When you share a suitcase, packing cubes are just necessary.

Ben: I started bringing my running shoes when we were on our last tour. The band really did a lot of running and it's a very nice way to see parts of the city. I ran up a hill, saw some cherry blossoms, went along the river, and saw some fish. It was great. Then my camera. I really like taking photos and it's always great to look back and have some cool photos.

Alex: I'm going to piggy off Ben’s Muji Packing Cubes and shoes; a good pair of walking shoes you can spend a day in. Then I've got my 3DS.

As someone who’s in South Korea for the first time, do you have any recommendations for me?

Crystal: It depends on what kind of route you want to take. I have a place recommendation. I really like this place called Buamdong, which is near where the palace is, but unlike the palace there are way less people. It's also got some nice museums, but also a bit of tradition. I think there's a gate and it looks really pretty, but it also looks out on a really beautiful mountain and the street almost reminds you a little bit of rural Japan. It's very neat and local and not a lot of people. It's really quiet, but it's very scenic.

Alex: Don't play the claw-machine games. They’re rigged. If you’re going to, go for the ones with small things inside them. The hook’s not strong enough to get the big stuff.

To end it off, is there anything you want to say to the fans?

Crystal: Thank you so much for listening to our music and finding us. If you have come to our gigs or are coming to our gigs, thank you so much for that also.

Simeon: We're excited to do more of everything.

Alex: Send us messages and fan art. We like seeing fanart.