The Teach You a Lesson OST is the smallest soundtrack of any 2026 Netflix Korean original — three songs, ten minutes and thirty-two seconds total, for a ten-episode series that hit global number one. That’s not a marketing oversight. It’s a deliberate choice rooted in how Korean action dramas treat music, and once you understand the logic, the Teach You a Lesson OST becomes one of the most interesting minimalist soundtracks in recent K-drama history.
This guide walks through every track, the singer-songwriter who effectively built the whole album alone, the indie vocalist who closes it out, and the reason a series this big needed so little music to land its emotional punches.
The Teach You a Lesson OST at a Glance
Release Date, Label, and Total Runtime
The official soundtrack was released on June 5, 2026 — the same day all ten episodes dropped on Netflix. The album is credited to 2026 Netflix Music, LLC and distributed by Genie Music and Stone Music Entertainment. Total runtime: 10 minutes and 32 seconds. Genre listed as ballad and folk rock. No Part 2 has been announced.
The Three Tracks
| # | Title | Artist | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Simple As Us | ABOUT (어바웃) | 3:42 |
| 2 | First And Last | ABOUT (어바웃) | 3:15 |
| 3 | Fade Into Forever | Im Joongwon (임중원) | 3:35 |
Three tracks. Two vocalists. One writer-composer at the center of everything.
Why Only Three Songs? The Korean Action Drama OST Tradition
International viewers coming from English-language romance dramas often expect six to twelve OST tracks released across multiple “Parts.” The Teach You a Lesson OST breaks that expectation hard, and the reason matters.
Score vs. Soundtrack — What Gets Released
Korean action and crime dramas separate their music into two layers. The action sequences, tension cues, and bureau raid scenes use instrumental score composed by a music director and almost never get released as a streaming product. The released soundtrack album is reserved for vocal songs that carry character emotion. Teach You a Lesson follows this convention exactly. There’s plenty of music in the show. Most of it just isn’t for sale.
The Juvenile Justice Precedent
Director Hong Jong-chan’s previous Netflix series, Juvenile Justice, released only two vocal OST tracks for ten episodes. The instrumental score by composer Choi Jung-in carried the rest of the show. Teach You a Lesson follows the same playbook, with one extra song and the same restraint.
Netflix’s Mini-OST Strategy
Recent Netflix Korean originals have been trimming their vocal OST releases down to three to five songs. Shorter playlists travel better on global Spotify charts, and concentrated releases push individual tracks into editorial playlists more effectively than diluted ones. The Teach You a Lesson OST is the leanest version of this strategy I’ve seen so far.
ABOUT (어바웃) — The Singer-Songwriter Behind the Whole Album
From NYC to Seoul — A Self-Love and Loneliness Songbook
ABOUT is a Korean singer-songwriter splitting time between New York and Seoul. He debuted in 2018, signed to Big Blue Records, and runs his own production studio called Nunchaku. His body of work — sixty-plus songs catalogued on Genius — circles two themes: self-love and loneliness. He’s known in the Korean indie R&B and soul scene for tight production and emotionally restrained vocals. The Teach You a Lesson OST is his largest mainstream visibility moment to date.
Why This Is Effectively a Solo Project
Here’s the detail English-language coverage missed. ABOUT didn’t just sing two of the three tracks. He wrote and composed all three of them, including the one performed by Im Joongwon. Look at the official Bugs credits:
- Simple As Us — Lyrics by ABOUT. Composed by ABOUT, Echez, Hwan, Addicted.
- First And Last — Lyrics by ABOUT. Composed by ABOUT, Echez, Addicted.
- Fade Into Forever — Lyrics by ABOUT. Composed by ABOUT, Hwan, Echez, Sine.wav.
The Teach You a Lesson OST is, in effect, an ABOUT EP with a featured vocal handed to Im Joongwon on the closing track. That framing changes how you listen to all three songs — they’re not three different artists’ takes on the show, they’re one writer’s three-part emotional arc.
Track 1 — “Simple As Us” (ABOUT)
The Sound — Piano, Guitar, Ambient Drums
The album opener starts quietly. Guitar and piano trade phrases like a conversation. An ambient drum sound expands the emotional space. The back half stacks dense layers of instrumentation while keeping the vocal restrained. The track is about a relationship that survives complicated reality just by existing — two people being enough for each other without needing the world to cooperate.
Where It Fits in the Series
In the show’s emotional grammar, “Simple As Us” reads as the Im Han-rim and Bong Geun-dae song. Their slow-build partnership through episodes 7 and 9 — the gambling den infiltration, the moment they realize they care about each other — has exactly the texture this track describes. Two people quietly holding each other up while the rest of the bureau handles the storm.
Track 2 — “First And Last” (ABOUT) — The Title Track
ABOUT’s “Last Letter to Unsaid Feelings”
According to Stone Music’s official lyric reel, ABOUT described “First And Last” as a song built around “a last letter for the feelings that were never delivered.” The arrangement supports that reading exactly — warm rounded guitar tones, analog instrument textures, melody that spreads slowly rather than peaking dramatically. This is the title track of the Teach You a Lesson OST, and it’s the song the show keeps coming back to.
Why This Is the Na Hwa-jin and Choi Ga-yoon Song
The show’s deepest emotional thread runs through Na Hwa-jin’s grief for his murdered fiancée Choi Ga-yoon. Episodes 3 and 6 stage the major beats of that grief — the bureau’s origin revelation, the prison meeting with Cho Gyu-cheol. “First And Last” sits over those moments as the emotional anchor. A letter that was never written, a goodbye that never happened, a promise being kept two years late. That’s the title track’s job, and it does it without raising its voice.
Track 3 — “Fade Into Forever” (Im Joongwon)
Son Eul Moa — The Rising Indie Band
Im Joongwon is the lead vocalist of Son Eul Moa (손을모아), a rising indie band in the Korean folk-rock scene. The Bugs album notes describe him as one of the newer voices breaking out of the indie circuit. Handing him the closing track was a deliberate move to bring a different texture — more weathered, more open — to ABOUT’s writing.
Strings, Dreamy Electric Guitar, and Release
The arrangement opens with quiet piano and dreamy electric guitar, then strings build underneath. Im Joongwon’s vocal pulls the song toward release rather than catharsis — the calm that comes after everything is set down, not the peak of emotion. In the context of the Teach You a Lesson OST, “Fade Into Forever” reads as the finale song. The bureau survives. The wounded find quiet. The story closes.
The Hidden Production Team
Echez, Hwan, Addicted, Sine.wav
The names you won’t see in English-language coverage but should know: Echez handles electric and acoustic guitar across all three tracks. Hwan plays electric guitar on the opener and closer. Addicted handles bass, piano, synth, drums, and vocal tuning on the first two tracks — effectively the band’s bassist-producer. Sine.wav brings piano and strings to the closing track and co-produces with mixing engineer Himo. This is a small, tight team building three songs together, which is part of why the album feels coherent despite spanning two lead vocalists.
Mastered at 821 Sound
All three tracks were mastered by Kwon Nam-woo at 821 Sound, with assistant Yoo Eun-jin. Kwon Nam-woo is one of Korea’s most respected mastering engineers — his client list includes BTS, IU, and most major Korean drama OSTs of the past decade. The Teach You a Lesson OST received the same mastering polish as productions ten times its size.
Choco Papa’s Take
What’s Working — Restraint Over Volume
I’m fifty-nine. I’ve sat through enough K-drama OSTs that overplayed their hand — six songs that all peaked at the same moment, sentimental ballads stacked on every emotional beat until the show drowned in its own music. Teach You a Lesson does the opposite. Three songs, used sparingly, given room to breathe. The action sequences keep their instrumental score. The vocal tracks come in when the show wants you to feel something specific, then step back.
That restraint reads as confidence. The writers and director trusted the performances and the script to carry the emotional weight on their own. The Teach You a Lesson OST is there to underline, not to substitute.
What’s Missing — No Action-Sequence Score Release
The one frustration is that the instrumental score never got a release. The bureau raid music, the prison confrontation cues, the rooftop scoring in episode 1 — none of it is available for streaming. The composer isn’t credited prominently in English-language sources, and the show’s score is currently invisible outside the episodes themselves. A future Part 2 release covering the instrumental score would be welcome. I’m not holding my breath.
Where to Listen
The full Teach You a Lesson OST is available on every major streaming platform. The official album is on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and the Korean services Genie, Melon, and Bugs. ABOUT posts behind-the-scenes content on his Instagram and runs a YouTube channel under the name ABOUT 1202. Stone Music Entertainment has uploaded the official lyric reels and a one-hour loop of “First And Last” for fans who want to live inside the title track.
Final Thoughts on the Teach You a Lesson OST
A ten-episode global hit with a three-song soundtrack sounds like an undersell. It isn’t. The Teach You a Lesson OST is what happens when a production team trusts its score to carry the action and reserves its vocal tracks for the moments that need a human voice. ABOUT writing all three songs gives the album a single thematic spine — the start, the middle, and the end of caring about another person under pressure — and Im Joongwon’s vocal turn at the close gives that spine a different mouth to speak through.
If you finished the show wondering why the music hit harder than its quantity suggested it should, the answer is in the math. Three songs. One writer. One mastering house. Ten minutes and thirty-two seconds that know exactly where to land.
For more on the show that made these songs work, see our complete series guide, the episodes 1-2 recap, and the episodes 3-4 recap. For a longer soundtrack to compare against, our My Royal Nemesis OST guide covers a more traditional multi-Part release structure.