It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
IU – Love wins all
The song is better than the usual run of the mill generic ballad I guess, but I mainly just enjoyed the video, which people sure have their wild and wacky opinions on. Look, it’s a cube making people’s lives miserable – as k-pop fans I can’t believe I need to explain this to you, you should all be very used to this by now.
(G)I-DLE – Super Lady
Decent, and more immediately appealing than “Wife” because there’s a little bit more meat on the bone musically, and the concept is simple enough for the media-illiterate morons who missed the point of “Wife” to actually understand. Pity about the unnecessary Teddyesque change-up at the end being kind of weak as piss but oh well, if you stop the song at that point you’re good.
Seola – Without U
Pretty pacy for Seola who usually specialises in dreary ballads when in solo mode. I’m liking this more upbeat style for her, lets hope she rolls with it some more.
VCHA – Girls of the Year
“Girls of the year” seems like a fitting title as I doubt this group’s ability to stay relevant all the way into 2025 if this low-tier American TV-show grade pop is what JYP thinks is going to cut it for a “global k-pop group”.
Weeekly – Stranger
No mosh, no core, no Jiyoon, no fun.
CIX – Lovers or Enemies
The song is decent but someone over on the video set needs to be told how to wrap a cable correctly. Clearly they are trying to murder these boys by ‘accident’ by leaving lots of cables lying around where they can either trip or garrotte themselves.
POW – Valentine
Not awful I suppose but certainly kind of soft and lacking definition, like that weird fluffy floor and wall decor. Don’t you just want to reach into your screen and vaccum the k-pop boy-sweat off it.
AB6IX – Traveler
What’s with AB6IX having good songs lately. I’m not used to this. Nobody warned me about this, I need time to adjust.
B1A4 – Back To You
The boy songs are good this year… so far, anyway. Even this stuff that they couldn’t even be bothered making a proper video for isn’t bad, making me unfortunately have to selectively bend my time-saving “bin all videos where nobody made any effort” rule.
E’LAST – Together
There really are a lot of songs coming out lately that are just kind of ‘slightly better than average’. Maybe it’s the lack of shit trends in songs this week that’s helping, just being able to hear the song for once without having to sift through the bullshit drops (there’s no such thing as an ‘anti-drop’, only a drop that sucks even more than the usual drop) and other crap is a refreshing change.
DXTEEN – Snowin’
This guy found a corpse of a dead girl in his fridge, I love how they play it off in this video like it’s so uwu and heart shape. Definitely a reader of my novels directed this.
Ryu Sujeong feat. XYLØ – SHXT
The trend of ex-Lovelyz members besides Mijoo being a bit of a let-down continues.
Giuk – Gory Pinocchio
Okay this song was boring so let’s have our non-Korean non-pop non-boring-music-that-appeals-to-“world-music”-egghead-fuckwits Asian music feature! Limited Express (Has Gone?) are a punk band from Japan with a different sound which is difficult to describe but just listen to them and you’ll probably get the idea. Aside from being completely bonkers they also have a pretty good handle on dynamics for a group that makes such a cacophonous racket. Crazy energy, great music, lots of fun and not one maid or visual kei or anime cosplay in sight. Not that I have anything against maid or visual kei or anime cosplay, but when every fucking group in Japan does it, that shit gets old…
Kim Jaehwan – Ponytail
Eh, snore. Good sign that roundup is dragging on too long, perhaps.
ATEEZ Jongho – Everything
I didn’t think IU’s ballad was amazing or anything but it sure sounds fucking great compared to the bullshit ballads 98% of the rest of k-pop singers do.
I.M feat Heize – Slowly
So boring he couldn’t even be bothered opening his mouth to pretend.
NCT 127 – Fact Check (2Spade Remix)
SM and their worthless fucking remixes. Who warmed up the planet for this crap?
CATtRIEVER – Sunflower
According to my song submitter this is a “duo composed by former Gugudan member Mimi and former MBLAQ member Thunder. They are dating and they will get married this year”, that’s lovely, perhaps they can sign this song at their wedding where it will be appreciated instead of making us all put up with it.
JMIN feat. Junny – So Bad
That horrible music we all hate.
Ash-B – Wish
Okay, time to save roundup. Ash-B obviously bothered to read my entire most fappable k-pop videos list that I published last week instead of just looking at screencaps from it out of context on social media, so she thought she’d make an early start on beating Apink in 2024, much appreciated. More sexy adults being sexy because they want to be sexy please and less kids popping it like a cheese, what’s so hard to understand about this. K-pop industry, get on it, and the rest of you kids, step up your media literacy, you’re going to need all of it you can get to survive the apocalyptic AI hellscape of the next few decades.
Ryu Jihyun – Get ready, Set, Go!
Oh and Ryu Jihyun is cuter than your bias, her song is great, and the video mrcs, what’s not to like? Stan Ryu Jihyun.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
taemteez – Classical music samples in k-pop
Quite a lot of these are actually incorrectly identified – the songs themselves are correct, but the level of ‘sampling’ isn’t always. See if you can pick which ones are actual samples, which ones are interpolations, and which ones have nothing more in common than rhythm/meter.
Ain’t no other fan – What does singing while dancing sound like?
Lots of very correct observations here however. There is a big trade-off between dancing and singing, and decisions are always made about what to compromise and where. Almost nobody sings extremely hard vocal lines AND dances ultra-physical and precise routines. For those of you who care about this kind of thing, the test at the end is fun, don’t read the comments until you’ve listened to all of it.
Pungdeng-E – Cotton Candy
Sitting somewhere musically between Pachelbel’s “Canon In D” and The Village People’s “Go West“, “Cotton Candy” was by far Pungdeng-E’s best song, but it’s sadly still not all that great. The problem with it is pretty obvious if you have ears – the nauseatingly grating tone chips heavily away at the anthemic core of the material, which would have sounded a lot better without the nauseating ‘let’s go, kids!’ children’s television vibe. The success of the song actually ensured Pungdeng-E’s downfall, because it was popular enough in kindergartens to convince the group that leaning even more heavily into nursery rhyme vibes instead of actual music was what their audience wanted. They may have even been right, but this decision sadly also robbed the world of a group who had serious untapped Orange Caramel 2.0 potential.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
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