When Italian garage-rock duo Little Boys announced a Korean tour, nobody expected seventeen shows across eight cities. But that’s exactly the kind of band they are, the ones who look at a map, spot somewhere unexpected, and ask why not.
Made up of vocalist and guitarist Elle Bertone and drummer Esse Pirotta, Little Boys blend punk, garage rock, and delta blues into something raw, chaotic, and hard to ignore.
They’ve toured Japan, recorded with Japanese producers, and built a following across Europe and Asia without ever taking the obvious route.
Korea had been on their radar for years.
Now they’re finally here, and they’re not rushing through it.
We sat down with them ahead of their Busan dates to talk about what brought them here, what’s surprised them, and why a rock duo from Italy ended up booking shows in Geoje.
You ended up in Korea for a whole month. Was that always the plan or did it just kind of snowball?
Korea had been a destination we wanted to reach for a long time. We actually thought it would be our first destination in Asia, but Japan happened first. Apparently geography doesn’t always respect the order of your desires.
What snowballed was the scale of it. We knew that if we finally came to Korea, we didn’t want to treat it as a place where you land, take a picture, play one show and say you’ve “done Korea.” The tour kept growing through contacts, invitations and people connecting us with other people, until it became seventeen shows across eight cities. In Geoje, for example, one show became two.
There’s something slightly irrational about spending this much time in a country on your first tour there β which is probably why it appealed to us. After waiting so long to come here, we wanted enough time for the country to stop feeling like a destination and start feeling like an experience.
Most international acts fly in, play Seoul, and leave. You’re going to Busan, Geoje, Jeonju, Jeju. What made you want to go that deep into the country?
Because the obvious route is usually the least interesting one.
We’re curious about what happens away from the places you’re supposed to go. A small venue in a city you barely know can become the reason you want to return to that country. There are people who decide to build a space for music exactly where they live, without waiting for their city to become culturally important first. Meeting those people matters to us.
Geoje attracted us just by looking at the map. We literally asked ourselves: what would an Italian rock duo be doing there? And that seemed like an excellent reason to go.
We have this idea that comfort is useful for recovering, but not necessarily for evolving. The less predictable routes force you to improvise, meet people you would never have selected through an algorithm, and confront versions of yourself you don’t encounter when everything works exactly as expected.
We don’t tour only to reproduce the same concert in different coordinates. We want the coordinates to interfere with us.
You’re recording with Myungje Woo from Bye Bye Sea while you’re here. Is that something you planned before arriving or did it happen organically?
It was already taking shape before we arrived. Karen from Rolling Stone Korea connected us with Myungje, and from there the possibility of actually creating something together developed.
That interests us much more than simply saying, “We collaborated with a Korean musician.” A collaboration is pointless if everybody protects their own territory. The interesting moment is when another musician does something that disrupts your habits and suddenly your original idea isn’t the best idea anymore.
As a duo, we have developed a very specific musical language between guitar and drums. Bringing a third creative mind into that language creates instability β and instability can be extremely productive.
We don’t know exactly what the recording will become yet, and I think that’s healthy. If we already knew exactly what it was going to sound like, there would be very little reason to collaborate.
What’s the biggest difference you’ve noticed between Korean audiences and the crowds you’re used to in Europe?
We’re only beginning the Korean shows, so pretending we already understand “the Korean audience” would be ridiculous. Ask us again after seventeen concerts and we’ll have earned the right to answer properly.
Even in Europe, I don’t really believe in one audience behaving in one national way. Every room develops its own psychology. You feel when people are observing you, when curiosity becomes involvement, when they suddenly give themselves permission to react.
That exchange matters because we don’t want the audience to behave like consumers watching a finished product. A live show should contain some risk. If the audience cannot affect what happens, you might as well watch the concert on a screen.
What I can say already is that something about the human atmosphere here has affected me. There is a quality in the way people have treated us that feels very genuine, warm and somehow clean. I still don’t have the exact word for it. Maybe finding that word is part of the month.
Two people on stage for a month-long tour is a lot of time together. How do you survive that without killing each other?
We intelligently assigned one of us a drum kit, so at least part of the aggression has a socially acceptable destination.
The less romantic answer is that we argue all the time. That’s normal. I’m actually more suspicious of two people who spend a month touring together and claim they never fight.
Being a duo removes most escape routes. If one person is exhausted, irritated or mentally somewhere else, there are no three other band members to absorb it. You notice immediately β and eventually it enters the music too.
So you learn something useful: not every disagreement needs to be solved, not every silence means something is wrong, and not every irritation deserves a three-hour psychological investigation. Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you shut up. Sometimes Sergio hits things professionally.
The real objective isn’t to avoid conflict. It’s to reach the final concert still curious about what the other person is going to do next.
And preferably still speaking to each other.
“We don’t tour only to reproduce the same concert in different coordinates. We want the coordinates to interfere with us.”
Korea has a very specific music scene right now. Did you know much about it before you came, and has anything here caught your attention since arriving?
We were interested before arriving, but there’s a huge difference between knowing a scene intellectually and physically entering it.
Online, a music scene becomes bands, genres, follower counts and venue names. Once you arrive, you realize that a scene is actually infrastructure made out of human beings: someone keeps a small club alive, somebody books an improbable band, somebody turns up on a Tuesday night, somebody introduces two musicians who otherwise would never meet.
That invisible architecture interests me almost as much as the music.
We’re still too early in the tour to pretend we’ve decoded the Korean scene. I’d rather remain ignorant for a little longer and actually observe it. Sharing stages with local bands tells you much more than researching them from Italy: how they occupy silence, how they treat the other bands, how audiences react, what happens after the show.
I’d rather leave Korea with ten new questions than arrive with one simplistic answer.
What’s the one thing about Korea that’s surprised you most since you arrived?
How quickly imagination becomes people.
For years “Korea” existed in our heads as an idea. Then it became a tour plan: cities, dates, venues, messages. Now those names have faces, voices, habits and personalities. Suddenly a dot on Google Maps is somewhere somebody is waiting for you.
That transformation is probably the most powerful part of touring.
Even before arriving, the enthusiasm surprised us. Big Bird Flys in Geoje is a good example: it’s a newly opened venue, and what began as one concert became a second date in the city. There is something beautiful about being invited into the beginning of somebody else’s story while you’re simultaneously trying to begin your own story in their country.
Maybe that’s what travel does at its best: it turns abstractions into relationships.
K-pop gets all the attention but Korea has a genuinely interesting indie scene. Has any of it found its way onto your radar since you arrived?
Yes, but we’re discovering it through people rather than through a playlist.
Myungje connects us to Bye Bye Sea, and throughout the tour we’ll share spaces and stages with musicians including Reverse N Rebirth and PCR. That gives us something more valuable than simply collecting band names: context.
The mainstream is what a country exports most efficiently. The underground is often where you understand what people are actually building for themselves.
That’s why the venues interest us too. Scenes don’t exist because somebody declares them culturally important. They exist because musicians keep playing, somebody keeps opening the door of a club, and people keep showing up even when nobody outside that room is paying attention.
If we leave Korea with several new bands in our headphones, great. If we leave understanding a little more about why those bands exist here, that’s much more interesting.
After Korea you’re heading to Japan. How do you mentally shift from one country to the next when you’re moving that fast?
We don’t completely shift. I don’t think we should.
Japan is part of the origin story of Little Boys β the band was born there in 2020 β so returning always contains something familiar. But this time we’ll arrive after a month in Korea and seventeen concerts. We won’t be exactly the same two people who arrived here.
I think one of the mistakes you can make while traveling is trying to consume countries as separate experiences: Korea finished, close the folder; Japan begins, open another one. Human beings don’t work like that.
Fatigue crosses borders. Ideas cross borders. Confidence crosses borders. People you meet change decisions you make three weeks later somewhere else.
So rather than mentally resetting, we let one place contaminate the next.
Then Japan gives us another five concerts to see what survived the journey. Maybe by the end of it some part of the band will have changed without us deliberately deciding to change it. That would be one of the best possible outcomes.
What do you want people to take away from your Busan show specifically?
I don’t necessarily want everyone to like Little Boys. I’d rather they understand exactly what we are and have a strong reaction to it.
There are only two people on stage, so everything is exposed. Guitar and drums are constantly negotiating with each other. There’s tension, contrast, mistakes, aggression, delicate moments, and the possibility that something goes somewhere we didn’t completely plan.
That vulnerability is part of the point.
In Busan we’ll play Club Realize on September 18 and 20, and Ol’55 on September 26. Three different nights mean three chances for the city to change the show β because I don’t believe a good concert should be perfectly reproducible.
So come even if you’re just curious. You don’t need to know our music beforehand. And come say hello afterward.
The best possible outcome isn’t leaving Busan thinking, “Great, we played three concerts.”
It’s leaving knowing there are people there who make us want to come back.
Italian garage-rock duo Little Boys bring their first South Korea tour to Busan for three shows β Club Realize on September 18 and 20, and Ol’55 on September 26.
