Song spotlight: “Twenty Five, Twenty One” by Jaurim

“Twenty Five, Twenty One” (스물다섯, 스물하나) is a song from the 9th studio album “Goodbye, grief” of veteran Korean rock band Jaurim (자우림). The song itself won “Best Modern Rock Song” in the 2014 Korean Music Awards and the album as a whole won “Best Modern Rock Album” the same year.

It also features in the 2022 Korean drama of the same name starring Kim Tae-ri (김태리) and Nam Joo-hyuk (남주혁).

The drama was a hit in 2022 and it was able to revive the song that was released almost a decade before the drama came out.

Find out more about the band responsible for the song and why it is quite impossible now to separate the drama from the song.

Jump to the English translation of the lyrics here.

Listen to the content of this page (excluding the lyrics) here or on your podcast app by searching for “Unfamiliar K-pop.”

About band Jaurim

If you didn’t know Jaurim before this song, you have a lot of catching up to do because this is a band that has just celebrated their 25th anniversary.

They held concerts in Korea just this July and also released an anniversary album that includes remastered versions to some of their biggest hits with the participation of 117 lucky fans.

Jaurim is one of the Korean bands from the 1990’s that has stayed relevant into the 2020s, and a band that has kept its core members for the most part of their two-and-a-half-decade run. 

Other than the band’s drummer that left in 2017, the team – Kim Yoon-ah (김윤아), Lee Sun-kyun (이선균) and Kim Jin-man (김진만) – has been together since their debut in 1997.

Jaurim started as one of the underground indie bands that were propping up in live music clubs in the Hongdae (홍대) area of Seoul. But Jaurim’s rather instant ascent to the wider Korean audience was quite unusual and serendipitous.

Jaurim members speak to this themselves on a 2021 TV special by broadcaster SBS that aimed to archive Korean pop music history.

In 1997, the band was just starting out in a live music club when they got an opportunity to fill a spot on a weekend show because another group wasn’t able to make it. This allowed them to perform at a more popular time than the smaller weekday shows reserved for rookie bands.

After their performance that day, they were approached by men who offered a job – to write a song for a movie that they were producing. Jaurim members recall laughing off these strange men at first but they happened to be the movie production team at the public broadcaster MBC. And their proposal was a legitimate one.

Even with only a few days to write a song for a movie, Jaurim wrote four – one of which was “Hey Hey Hey,” the song that made it into the movie “Man with Flowers” (꽃을 든 남자) the same year and the song that led to the band’s debut.

It’s also the song that took them from indie underground music status to the top of the chart of a prominent music TV show back then – 가요톱10, the equivalent of today’s Music Bank. According to Archive-K, Jaurim was the first indie band to have competed for the number one spot on a music show chart.

The K-drama and chart revival

In 2022, the revival of the song has happened in an era where K-pop and Korean dramas are being bolstered by streaming platforms.

The Korean drama “Twenty Five Twenty One” that took on Jaurim’s song title is from the Korean network tvN but was made available for global streaming on Netflix.

According to data platform FlixPatrol, the drama was one of the top 10 shows on Netflix worldwide for 5 weeks straight from week 11 to week 15 of 2022.

Given this level of popularity, it’s safe to say that the drama had a lot to do with the song  becoming the most popular song on the band’s YouTube channel, and on Apple Music and Spotify. As of mid August of 2022, the song is Jaurim’s most popular track by far on Spotify – rounded up to 5.4M streams, compared to their second most popular song at 768,000.

The impact of the drama was significant enough to boost the song in the charts as well.

According to the Digital Chart rankings from the government-backed data aggregator Circle Chart, the song “Twenty Five Twenty One” entered the top 200 in the week of February 13th this year. It entered the top 100 about a month later in the week of March 20th, peaking at 33 in the week of April 10th. 

It has been on the top 100 for 21 weeks from March 20th to Aug 8th, 2022.

The drama ended in April but the song is sticking around even in August.

The connection between the drama and the song

One of the reasons for this is perhaps the connection formed between the song’s lyrics and the drama’s storyline through a common theme – youth and nostalgia.

The drama centers on a high-school fencer and her relationship with a college dropout struggling to overcome financial challenges and to become a reporter. In the midst of their own struggles, the two characters and their friends find hope, love, and strength to push forward. 

These memories are bittersweet – and the song captures this in the lyrics.

The image of being with someone surrounded by the beauty of the flowers, the sea, the sun, only to be overwhelmed by the nostalgia of it all. You can only reminisce about the past but there is still a yearning for those days.

As the final line of the chorus goes “What I thought would forever be, Twenty Five Twenty One.”

Translated lyrics to “Twenty Five, Twenty One” by Jaurim

In the season when the wind blows and flowers wither
It still feels like I might be holding your hand
Not knowing then that flowers could be so beautiful
Like I do now to my very core

Your scent
Arrives with the wind
What I thought would forever be
Twenty five, twenty one

That day the sea was quite consoling
It still feels like I might be able to touch it
There’s you and me under the glittering sunlight
My heart ached with happiness in this dream

The song from that day
Arrives with the wind
What I thought would forever be
Twenty five, twenty one

Your voice, your eyes
Even the warmth of your body
They fade away the more I try to remember
I can’t hold on to the pieces of you

In the season when the wind blows and flowers wither
It still feels like I might be holding your hand
Not knowing then that you could be so beautiful
Like I do now to my very core

Your scent
Arrives with the wind
What I thought would forever be
Twenty five, twenty one

The song from that day
Arrives with the wind
What I thought would forever be
You and me from the days gone by

What I thought would forever be
Twenty five, twenty one
Twenty five, twenty one

Related links

• Korean lyrics to the song
• Jaurim’s official website, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify
• Live performance of the song on Season 2 of busking show “Begin Again”
• YouTube playlist of covers to the song