How Sticky Shorts Was Born

And somehow…we are finally here.

Honestly I still can’t fully believe it.

Sticky Shorts is something I’m extremely proud of and grateful for, and I really wanted to write about how all of this started because the story feels so absurd that sometimes even I struggle to believe it actually happened.

I always loved singing, but mostly in a karaoke kind of way. Friends often told me I should try making actual music, but I was reluctant for years. Especially because my voice is damaged from heavy smoking and never sounded “technically correct” to me.

Then one day my friend Elina Chi-won — an insanely talented artist who now also helps us creatively with lyrics and concepts — told me something that completely changed how I viewed music.

Elina said:
“Indie musicians don’t need perfect voices. In fact your voice is perfect BECAUSE it sounds imperfect.”

That sentence genuinely changed something in my brain.

So eventually I released my first solo single, Glassball.

But even after that I still felt incomplete somehow. I realized I didn’t just want music. I wanted a band.

Now let’s rewind a little more because this is where things become ridiculous.

At that time I was going through a period of really extreme isolation and social withdrawal. Seunghoon had a very intense work schedule, I barely went outside, barely saw people, and honestly survived mostly through food delivery because I wouldn’t even go to supermarkets.

And then there was my delivery driver.

His name was Johnny.

He was ridiculously handsome, had cool earrings, good style, and one day I noticed a stamp on his wrist from a gay bar I knew. So immediately I thought:
“Oh. He’s one of us.”

After that I started ordering food suspiciously often.

Johnny was not very talkative, but I became weirdly determined. One day I even decided to answer the door wearing only a bathrobe to seduce him, except unfortunately that specific day a completely different delivery guy showed up and well...

But eventually I got the timing right.

One night I invited Johnny inside for beer and pizza and somehow convinced him to stay. Luckily for me, Johnny is not the kind of person who follows rules very closely, so he ignored his next delivery order, invented some excuse about a flat tire, and stayed with me instead.

At the time we had absolutely no idea this would eventually become the beginning of a band.

After that we kept meeting occasionally. Horror movies, drinking, hanging out, sex, emotional chaos. The usual.

Then one night this year we went bar-hopping together and both got extremely drunk.

On the way home, my bladder was bursting

,  I desperately needed a bathroom, but Johnny suddenly decided this was the perfect moment to attempt a handstand in the middle of the street.

He failed spectacularly.

I started laughing.
Then he started laughing.
Then an older man walked past us looking completely horrified and confused.

That destroyed me emotionally.

I laughed so hard that I literally peed on my shorts.

So now we had another problem.

Since Johnny lived closer than me, we walked around twenty minutes back to his apartment while I tried to psychologically survive the situation.

Except when we arrived, we discovered his roommate was having a birthday party packed with drunk guests that Johnny had completely forgotten about.

So naturally I had to walk into this party wearing what were essentially humiliation shorts.

At that point honestly nobody cared because everybody there was already drunk anyway.

So I went to shower.

And while I was singing inside the shower, this very tall drunk hunk suddenly walked into the bathroom to pee while casually talking to me about some fight he had apparently been involved in earlier that night.

Then completely out of nowhere he pulled the shower curtain aside and said:

“My name is Alexander. I’m looking for a singer for my band. I like your voice and I like your energy.”

At 3AM this felt less like a real conversation and more like a hallucination.

The next morning I told Johnny about it and he immediately recognized the name. Apparently he had played music before with Alexander and two cousins Seo-jun and Jin-ho.

Now this terrified me because according to Johnny they were all extremely talented and intimidating musicians and there was absolutely no way I was showing up to some formal audition like a normal functional person.

So instead we recorded a sample ourselves.

Johnny played.
I sang.
We sent it.

The next day Alexander called saying:
“We’re in.”

And honestly from there everything moved strangely fast.

We met, talked about our vision, shared ideas, started creating music together and somehow everything clicked naturally almost immediately.

And yes, the band name actually came from the sticky shorts incident.

At first it was just a joke while brainstorming names because most of the serious names we liked were already taken.

But somehow Sticky Shorts survived every discussion and became the final choice.

Which honestly feels appropriate because the entire existence of this band started through a chain of embarrassing, drunken, emotionally questionable accidents anyway.

When I was younger I used to dream about being in a band constantly, but I never genuinely believed it would happen.

And yet somehow, against all logic, here we are.