Back in 1800s Korea, a certain Mr Lee took the stage name Nal-chi. It means ‘flying fish’, an apposite moniker given that he was a celebrated Jultagi performer (tightrope walker). Lee Nal-chi went on to become a master singer in the pansori tradition, the theatrical storytelling form unique to Korea. He ended up as one of the eight acknowledged pansori masters of the era, famed for projecting his voice at such volumes that it could apparently be heard for miles.

For all this acclaim, he could never have dreamed that, 131 years after his death, his adopted name would be better known than it was in his lifetime. Not for his own music, no recordings of which exist, but for that of the band named after him.

Leenalchi — the band — is a sensation. Just as the original Lee Nal-chi rose to prominence from an inauspicious start as a servant’s son, the group has become the hippest act in Korea from what was supposed to be a one-off theatre project in 2019. Ahead of three gigs in England as part of the K-Music Festival, I spoke to the band’s leader, Jang Young-gyu, in Seoul.

We start at the beginning. The Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, in the south-west of Korea, tasked Young-gyu (a film composer and member of K-indie darlings SsingSsing) with scoring a modern staging of the old pansori tale, Sugungga. “I used the pansori elements, but I didn’t want it to be an exact replica of traditional pansori,” he explains, through a translator. It resulted in such a successful set of songs, smartly interpreted, that the musicians decided to continue. While the group’s membership has been fluid, the unusual format was established early on: twin bass guitars, drums, synths and electronic percussion, along with three or four pansori singers.

Customarily, pansori is a duet between a solo singer and their gosu, a drummer playing the buk. “The story and the rhythm are the most important aspects,” Young-gyu continues, “so, I took out the harmonic elements – the guitar, the piano – and focused on drums and bass. I was intent on making music that made my body groove and was very confident that people would still enjoy the music without those harmonic elements.”

He was right. The group’s energetic sound so successfully mixed heritage and modernity that it quickly gathered fans over lockdown. Viral video collabs with the Ambiguous Dance Company for a series of tourism shorts (‘Feel the Rhythm of Korea’) led to adverts with everyone from Gucci to Greenpeace.

Finding success during the pandemic was an odd experience, but Leenalchi as a touring live act has finally been unleashed. Their first album, Sugungga, came out in 2020 and features scenes from the old pansori tale of that name, the most comic of the pansori canon. Those songs, featuring anthropomorphic characters like a sickly dragon king, a loyal turtle and a wily rabbit, will be present in the upcoming shows, but the band is also expected to debut songs from their next album, Mul Mit (meaning ‘underneath’ or ‘underwater’). Rather than working with an existing pansori, this will consist of entirely new music. The inspiration was the Korean folk tale of the fairy and the woodcutter, but it has been reimagined to become the story of an astronaut lost in space. Not content with mere terrestrial success, Leenalchi are expanding into the heavens.

Leenalchi play K-Music Festival 10th-anniversary shows in Nottingham (November 7), Leeds (November 8) and London (November 10)