“You’re basically writing eight songs into one”: how a track from a Kyiv studio became a K-pop idol’s solo debut

On 24 August, Vietnamese singer Hanbin, a member of the South Korean group TEMPEST, released his first solo single, No Fear. Two of the names in its credits come from Kyiv.

One of them, Yevhenii Bardachenko, told the story to Suspilne Kultura, the culture service of Ukraine’s public broadcaster.

Bardachenko is a songwriter, the head of Jay Music Label and a former member of the Kyiv band Dilemma; on this track he is co-writer and producer. The arrangement is by Leonid Petrovskyi, who works as L.1d. The Korean team handled the final lyric changes that tailored the song to the artist.

The song was not written for him

The strangest thing about this story is that No Fear was never made with a particular release in mind. Bardachenko’s team deliberately writes what he calls universal songs: a strong record that a label can then fit to an artist, to the choreography and to the visual idea.

The road from a Kyiv studio to a Korean label ran through the industry machine rather than through personal contacts. About four years ago Bardachenko made a deliberate move from the Ukrainian market to the international English-language one and connected with a large European publisher that specializes in Asia, and briefs from labels with specific requests started arriving through it. That is the channel that carried the song into a listening session at YH Entertainment.

“In Ukraine the model is simple: you know the artist, you send him the song directly, and if he likes it, he takes it. In Europe, America and Asia it doesn’t work like that,” Yevhenii Bardachenko told Suspilne Kultura.

Then came the stage the writers never saw. After the single came out, Hanbin himself said that he and his team had gone through about two hundred demos; roughly twelve were left after the first cut, and he kept coming back to this one. Bardachenko can only guess why: he says horn parts have always grabbed him too — “horns are pure energy for me, they just make a track move.”

Between the demo and the release the song barely changed. The melody, the structure and the core idea stayed the same, and the edits mostly concerned the mix. In the writer’s own words, the finished version sounds practically identical to the demo, only with Hanbin’s voice on it.

A brief that reads like an architectural blueprint

The hardest part, Bardachenko says, begins with group briefs. He describes his first experience of one like this: the composition had to be structured around the band’s eight members, and each of them needed a separate musical section with a melody of its own. By his account, the melody and the structure alone, with no lyrics yet, took seven days.

That, he says, was when the distance between the two industries became visible. A brief from a Korean label looks more like an architectural blueprint than a creative commission — and that is not a metaphor he added after the fact, but the way he describes his own working document.

Bardachenko names melody and emotional honesty as the strength of Ukrainian writers, and not knowing the rules of the game as their weakness. He speaks separately about copyright: by his estimate, about ninety-eight percent of artists in Ukraine do not understand what it is or where to register it. He started out in Dilemma, who entered Ukraine’s national Eurovision selection in 2018, and now runs a label with a catalog of roughly two hundred tracks and is setting his sights on the American market.

Earlier we wrote about how a song by a musician from Lutsk ended up in a video game with no involvement from the songwriter herself — another case of Ukrainian music reaching the world through an intermediary.