It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Megan Thee Stallion feat. RM – Neva Play
A reasonable beat and Megan is just how she usually is but RM sounds laughable here, like his silly fake rap voice has been computer-pitched down about a third to make him seem “more badass” or something. We all know he doesn’t really sound like this, Kris Wu’s “Juice” paved the way for fake rap voices in k-pop.
MEOVV – Meow
Apparently on Teddy’s label but not written by Teddy, and it shows because it’s the same Teddy-lite that Babymonster have been bringing to the table recently. I have a funny feeling that in a few months the annual Kpopalypse worst list for 2024 is going to be very much “in your area”.
Tzuyu – Run Away
Tzuyu has quite a sweet song on her hands here, it’s just a pity that there’s so much vocalising. It’s really good, and chopping out maybe 30% of the singing here would have made it even better, because Tzuyu’s pitch-corrected voice isn’t strong enough to do this much heavy lifting with no rest.
RIIZE – Combo
Some cool distorted bass sounds help what’s otherwise a pretty average song get over the line.
Yerin – Wavy
Yerin’s song just sounds like anything by anybody in 2024.
Loosemble – Cotton Candy
It’s alright but the combination of the boringly washed-out video (with all the currently trendy and tiresome “lo-fi” visual tricks) and the weird verse melodies that just add wrong notes for no reason kind of takes the shine off it. Neither Loossemble nor ARTMS have a real Loona-beater yet, we wait and hope.
Taemin – Horizon
Hey Taemin does though, this is pretty cool and a lot like Loona’s “Star“. I guess it must be a pretty great song because the government hacked the video or something, or maybe it was BTS fans jealous that SHINee paved the way, who knows.
Onew – Beat Drum
Onew’s song is also pretty good, refreshing and different, it doesn’t sound really like anything else at the moment. I’d let him feel me up in the club.
MADEIN – Uno
Not a bad song, pity about the dogshit AI video for fuckheads. If the AI bothers you as much as it bothers any other sensible person with a brain, I suggest watching this “performance video” instead which is way better, or this “natural version” that the label made after they realised how badly they had fucked up. Anyway the melodies are meh but I’m loving the keyboards in this song which remind me of FSOL for some reason and it just makes the song for me.
Le Sserafim ft. Pinkpantheress – Crazy
Pinkpantheress is great but she doesn’t really suit this song and adding her changes nothing about it other than adding a little bit to the running time (or maybe it doesn’t, I didn’t check).
TXT – Kitto Zutto
I don’t mind this reinvention of TXT as some kind of idol rock group but this song is kind of a mess really.
xikers – Witch
Weird, slow and boring. They’ve had worse, but they’ve also had a lot better.
BOYNEXTDOOR – Nice Guy
I think they were going for some kind of ‘happy vibes’ thing, but knowing what young Korean men are like, a song called “Nice Guy” really sounds more like a red flag than anything. Kind of makes it hard to enjoy, even if the song hypothetically didn’t suck ass, which sadly it does.
NCT WISH – Dunk Shot
My wish for this NCT subunit is less sportball and better music.
ONEWE – Off Road
The SUV in this video doesn’t even go off-road – weak! Why are Onewe wrecking the environment with their needlessly big vehicles. Why does everyone have to drive a tank nowadays, sheesh. “Oh but I have a family”, “Oh but I have to tow a trailer” people had families and towed trailers 30 years ago too but they didn’t all drive minibuses back then, cunt. Anyway, song’s not bad tbh, I’d probably like it even more if Onewe weren’t such a bunch of soccer mums.
LUCY – Complex
The pairing of this song with some shit anime video is really fitting because it really does sound like a bland song made for some shit anime. I’m not sure if it actually is for an anime, or if that’s just coincidence, or if someone thought “gosh this sounds like a song for a shit anime so let’s make a shit anime video” but either way it’s not that good so I don’t really care.
Fifty Fifty – Starry Night
After last week’s roundup several people contacted me and said that I missed an important song that week, “Starry Night” by Fifty Fifty. So I thought I’d better include it here, just so my lovely readers didn’t miss out. It’s a pretty good song as it happens, certainly not amazing but definitely up there with the generally good track record of Fifty Fifty songs overall. I guess it’s just a shame that there’s a boycott on right now which means nobody will get to hear it. After all k-pop fans always adhere to boycotts 100%, like that time every k-pop fan boycotted Allkpop for spreading revenge porn and being misogynist, and then Allkpop went out of business because nobody visited them ever again. Or that time when SM and EXO-CBX had a contract dispute and the EXO fans rallied around their favourite artists and got everyone to stop buying SM product, successfully forcing SM to close its doors. So we can be guaranteed that nobody is listening to this song and the ten million views it has at the time of writing are just a mistake that will be corrected soon.
Baekhyun – Pineapple Slice
The SM team didn’t take any issue with the lyrics to ‘Pineapple Slice’ when they were making the album because their vision for original and wholesome music was crystal clear to them. Slang terms aren’t taught in school and not everyone is familiar with them. The phrase “callin’ it extra sweet, take one bite, pineapple slice of me” is also not a commonly used slang term for anything sexual and therefore not a problematic word itself, but that any listener could take the word to mean something different depending on their personal experience and exposure to certain slang meanings…
Chanyeol – Back Again
I have to wonder why Chanyeol’s solo stuff has been quite good because where the hell were these songs in EXO days?
Yungin, Jay Park – Stand Out
I’d travel time and bully Jay Park as a kid too if he doesn’t cough up a bottle of soju for my girlfriend soon. I sent him a message on OnlyFans and he didn’t even reply tsk tsk.
SuA – Feel Alive
My first reaction was that this song feels pretty soft for a Dreamcatcher member’s solo track but then I remember that Dreamcatacher themselves are pretty goddamn soft these days. They might as well throw in the towel and reform Minx at this point.
Cleo – You’re Mine
These poor girls.
Xdinary Heroes feat. YB Yoon Do Hyun – Instead
They’re really trying hard here, aren’t they. Full marks for effort but it’s all just a bit silly really isn’t it. I guess it’s cute and if I had a crush on one of the members it’d probably trigger my mommy instinct.
L5ST – Only One
Guitar rock really is trending isn’t it. I’m unsure why this song goes full Metallica for five seconds in the intro randomly but it’s not enough to save the generally bland writing.
AEONIT – Navigation
Well at least they got the Roman numerals on the fucking clock correct. Madein take note!
Dahye – The first ending
Dahye used to be in BESTie and like most B/C tier ex-girl group members from the previous decade she’s now in “sitting on a chair wearing a white dress singing a boring ballad” hell.
Kino – Dancing On The Floor
This was mega boring and generic so instead let’s have our weekly Asian but not Korean not pop not world music feature here instead yay! This week it’s Regurgitator and I have no idea how well-known this group are outside of Australia, but Australians who were around listening to music when they started out definitely know them because they had several hits here. This early single “Kong Foo Sing” takes the piss out of a lot of stuff (but mainly The Beastie Boys’ “So What’cha Want“), but Regurgitator weren’t really a parody act at heart and changed up their sound several times over the next couple of decades.
Henry – Always Been You
What is this lighter-waving crap.
Ruki – Himawari
This solo from a JO1 member is actually one of the better “band but idol” kind of things lately, even if it’s texturally weird as fuck with the guitars and brass fighting for space in the midrange.
Toni Rei feat. ShyboiiTobii – 19
Apparently a former BAE19573 member, I didn’t know that group were even around long enough to have former members.
Youngtak – SuperSuper
Sorry kid, Sohee outsold.
Crystal Tea – Mr. Grade B
Definitely a band that I want to like but this song just doesn’t make me give a fuck, it’s just so crowded with vocal. It’s the same mistake that Tzuyu’s producer made this week and that a lot of k-pop makes – if you’ve got a cool backing track, let the vocalist breathe a bit so it can be heard!
ISHA – Illusion
That girl who was in Berry Good is back and someone on my livestreams keeps enthusiastically asking me to cover each new song. I don’t know why because they’re all boring as fuck? I can only guess this person is an abusive ex-partner trying to get his revenge on her via bad Kpopalypse reviews so I just wanna say to Isha please don’t take it personal, your music sucking is just my opinion, be strong and I hope you find someone better soon, or alternatively just live your best life without some asshole trying to bring down your hit/miss ratio.
Mitty ft Dvckii – Overthinking
mrds
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
Keipab – How K-pop music videos are made?
The got one very important detail wrong here – several days of 12 hour workdays? Now that’s a luxury only afforded to the very biggest groups with the biggest budgets (or the slightly less big groups with the biggest bank loans). On the vast majority of music video shoots they just shoot around the clock with no breaks at all until it’s done, regardless of how long it takes, because it’s cheaper that way. Instead of three 12 hour days they’ll just cram 36 hours in one long stretch to save on production costs. Yes this leads to exactly the sort of things you might think it would lead to.
all-kulture – the MESSY fallout,and comeback of FIESTAR
A fairly well-researched history of Fiestar’s career – that is, until it devotes the latter half to discussing Cheska’s livestreams. The creator of this video should have really done some more research and read my interview with Cheska, where she puts a lot of what she said on livestreams into a broader context. Sadly this video without such research falls into the same trap as many articles written around the same time, focusing on sensationalism and celebrity gossip while missing a lot of what Cheska was trying to get at. It’s that weird obsession with gossip and “mess” that k-pop followers have, instead of genuine (as opposed to performative) concern about the actual underlying issues, that ensures the idol system will never change. As one of the few Kpopalypse interviews left that hasn’t been removed by “external forces” (yet – give it a few weeks), I suggest that if you haven’t read my interview with her, that you read it while you still can!
Girls’ Generation TTS – Twinkle
A pretty bland song thanks to the bulk of it being taken up with a dreary grandpa-music blues-based I-IV-V-I verse and chorus, paired with a punishing video containing some very attractive people lumbered with incredibly unattractive styling, clothing and set design. On top of that we have Shure Super 55 microphones being used incorrectly (a laughably inept SM Entertainment habit which persists to this day) and worst of all SM pulling their usual teaser trick of having an intro with music far superior to anything in the song itself. Despite it all people loved it because SNSD were just that hot in the marketplace when this came out that the girls could have spread their asscheeks and taken a giant dump onstage and people still would have praised them for “cleaning the plate” or whatever people used to say instead of that back in 2012.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
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