In an instant, your anxiety turned into fear.
Every sacrifice needs an audience. In older ceremonies, the victim did more than die: one body was converted into communal relief, the crowd watched the exchange, and authority called the loss necessary. Modern systems rarely build stone altars, but the underlying bargain survives. Work, debt, status, and belonging keep asking for portions of the self until surrender becomes ordinary enough to pass for participation.
Las Vegas K-Goth trio Past Self brings that bargain into view in their new video for 제물 / Jemul. Released during the band’s ongoing European tour, the clip was shot and directed by Kameren Isaguirre from a screenplay by vocalist and guitarist Sung Joo Kim. Isaguirre also edited the video and produced it alongside Past Self.
The song’s premise treats contemporary life as a form of spiritual extortion: a social order that takes money, time, dignity, and private feeling in exchange for continued membership. Echo-heavy guitar figures hang above a steady rhythm section while Sung’s Korean and English vocals follow anxiety into fear, hallucination, betrayal, and ruined love. The music bears traces of The Cure and Lebanon Hanover, along with the broader dramatic scale of The Horrors and the saturated guitar mass of My Bloody Valentine, yet Past Self keeps each part legible beneath the distortion.
When we first covered the single, the band explained its central metaphor:
“제물 / Jemul translates to ‘an offering,’” says the band. “It refers to a society that constantly demands a piece of one’s soul as payment for being allowed to stay alive. The song aims to draw metaphorical ties between this concept and human sacrifices that a cult might make to appease their deities.”
Isaguirre brings that concept to life in the song’s enigmatic and arcane visual. Sung appears among dry reeds and bare trees, his face painted white, his lips black, and his eyes sealed beneath a broad red blindfold. Dark stains spread across his loose white blouse as he carries a cloth-bound sword through the brush, raises it toward the sky, and performs with a red guitar. The blindfold makes him both marked victim and sightless officiant: he cannot see the spectators, though the camera is always watching him.
A vast red disc glows behind a black field of branches. A single rose lies in disturbed soil, and the sword is planted beside it, turning the landscape into altar and grave at once. Elsewhere, a second blindfolded figure appears collapsed on a concrete slab before slowly rising beneath the final blue light of dusk. The images never settle into a literal execution. Instead, they suggest preparation, selection, and aftermath, leaving sacrifice as a role that can pass from one body to another.
Night changes the video’s visual grammar. A severe blue-white lamp blows out faces and fabric as the trio plays in tall grass. Movement smears across the frame, bodies divide into doubles, and horizontal scan lines make the footage resemble a damaged transmission. By the final wide shot, a lone figure sits beside a small table among the weeds, reduced nearly to evidence. The altar described in the lyrics has become an anonymous stretch of land under surveillance.
The red blindfold is the video’s most effective device: it blocks the subject’s vision while leaving him completely available to ours. In a song about society exacting payment from the soul, visibility becomes another fee. The victim may be unable to identify the crowd, but the crowd has no trouble identifying the victim.
Watch the video for 제물 / Jemul below:
Written by Sung Joo Kim and mixed and mastered by Spektor, 제물 / Jemul is available to order through Past Self’s Bandcamp.
Past Self are currently completing their debut European tour before returning to North America for dates in October and November. See the remaining itinerary below:
European Tour Dates:
- Sep 8 — Paris, France — Le Chinois
- Sep 10 — Bologna, Italy — Freakout Club
- Sep 11 — Milan, Italy — Slaughter Club
- Sep 12 — Vicenza, Italy — Totem
- Sep 13 — Zürich, Switzerland — Werk21
- Sep 16 — Bucharest, Romania — Control Club
- Sep 18 — Munich, Germany — Rote Sonne
- Sep 19 — Hamburg, Germany — Hafenklang
- Sep 22 — Warsaw, Poland — Klub Mechanik
- Sep 23 — Kraków, Poland — Klub RE
- Sep 24 — Leipzig, Germany — Tanzcafé Ilses Erika
- Sep 25 — Bochum, Germany — Die Trompete
- Sep 26 — Berlin, Germany — Urban Spree
North American Dates:
- Oct 1 — Seattle, WA — The Funhouse — Immortalis 2026
- Oct 2 — Portland, OR — The Coffin — Immortalis 2026
- Oct 4 — Vancouver, BC — The Cobalt Cabaret — Immortalis 2026
- Oct 10 — Fort Lauderdale, FL — Revolution Live — Hell’s Gate Festival
- Nov 9 — San Francisco, CA — Brick & Mortar Music Hall
- Nov 11 — Reno, NV — The Holland Project
- Nov 14 — Huntington Beach, CA — Darker Waves Festival
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