Yes it’s the list that hate-readers have been waiting for all year – the list of the worst k-pop songs of 2024 according to Kpopalypse! Read on and enjoy!
Welcome to the worst k-pop songs of 2024 according to Kpopalypse! So what was 2024 like for k-pop? While I felt that it was a better year overall than last year for song quality, the worst songs are really fucking spectacularly awful this year in ways that are rarely seen.
Most people will probably skip straight to the list part and then check with shaking hands and sweaty palms if their favourite artists’ favourite songs are included here so they can then go and complain about it somewhere (spoiler: probably), but if you’re a new reader and/or reasonably intelligent you may wish to read the below dot points before you dive in. These points explain this list’s criteria and general aims.
Songs are from 1st January 2024 to 31st December 2024, however the time window for this list actually extends a little bit before both of these dates to catch any steaming turds that may have missed making it into previous year’s lists. This list was published on 31st December 2024 but may appear earlier for some readers due to timezones.
Feature tracks only – songs released with a music video, or as a single, or featured on live stages.
OST songs are not eligible, because they’re almost always such complete crap that they would dominate this list and make it a very correct but very boring read.
Songs that have confirmed AI use in either the music or accompanying visuals are considered too shitty and disgusting even for a list like this one and are banned from consideration in all Kpopalypse lists nah fuck it, we’re going to include them anyway. If we don’t kick them, they won’t learn!
Songs for sporting events are not eligible, these are ignored for the good of humankind, as Kpopalypse does not do the sport ball shape.
Christmas songs are not eligible as they are of such consistently low quality that they have their own special list of shittiness just for them.
“K-pop” is deliberately defined a little loosely for this list as music coming from the Korean industry – songs that aren’t strictly “pop” are eligible. Songs from Koreans or backed by Korean labels trying to break into non-Korean markets are eligible. Non-Korean attempts at trying to exist inside the Korean pop scene and “be a k-pop” are also eligible.
This list is 100% subjective, it’s all about what I think of the music. Sure, often I’ll discuss other aspects too, but that’s mainly just for entertainment, as most bad Korean pop songs actually have similar flaws and repeating myself a whole ton does not make for a very fun list. The other factors don’t really have any bearing on which songs made it into here. Yes this list is biased – as it should be, because what is the point of a personal list with no bias in it – but it’s musically biased.
The opinions expressed here are not important and do not represent any kind of “authority”. This list proves nothing except what my own subjective opinions are. Your own opinions will most likely differ. If you managed to extract any actual enjoyment out of these terrible songs, then good for you.
If you are upset by this list, good. Maybe go and complain about it somewhere, I’m sure that will work out just fine for you.
On the other hand if you’re thinking I’m just someone who hates k-pop in general, on statistical averages that’s actually very true (Sturgeon’s Law applies to k-pop as it apples to everything else), but know that the Kpopalypse favourites list for 2024 is also a thing so maybe go and check that out to hear some much better songs, I highly recommend it. Also you may wish to check the honourable and dishonourable mentions post for 2023 for more good AND shit songs you may have missed.
Now that you know what potential horrors you’re dealing with, let’s now get on with the list!
KPOPALYPSE’S 30 WORST K-POP SONGS OF 2024
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30. BABYMONSTER – Clik Clak
YG Entertainment’s new girl group Babymonster have certainly been a severe letdown ever since they debuted last year, and honestly, I don’t even know if they’re going to get significantly better at this point. At first I had some hope, after all YG’s previous big girl group Blackpink had a less than outstanding debut as well, but managed to work out the kinks eventually and eventually got handed a few really good songs. However “Clik Clak” is just total fucking shit, and really makes me think that nobody is even interested in trying. Of course the beat is terrible, the usual empty-ass nonsense people think constitutes a rap beat these days, but what really seals the deal on this track being so awful is the rapping. Listen to the seriously good rapping coming out of XG right now, and then listen to this fucking shit, the difference in quality is like night and day. The bar for idol girl group rap concepts has lifted significantly and YG didn’t get the memo, these weak-ass materialistic rhyming couplets don’t cut the mustard in 2024, not that this would have sounded any good even in 2004, or 1984, but these days it’s just getting laughed right out of the room. YG better have some of the money from those gambling and prostitution dens still stashed away because with their premium product being total garbage comebacks like this, I’m really not sure how else they’re going to pay the bills this year…. oh, who am I kidding. K-pop fans are a cult, they will lap up any old shit.
29. RM feat. Moses Sumney – Around the world in a day
The latest trend in rap music globally these days is to have literally no fucking beats at all, it’s some kind of weird artistic reaching where the rappers want to be “taken seriously as artists”, so they just rap over anything, the attitude being “I’m so culturally relevant that just my raps alone can carry the show, it doesn’t even matter what music is under them, man”. I like to blame Kanye West and his “everyone pause the music to hear me mumble” narcissistic wank for this, but the trend might have actually started with some of the weirder stuff on Anticon label, I’m not sure, but somewhere along the line people somehow got the idea in their heads that you don’t need beats for rap music. Of course people are forgetting that a large part of the initial popularity of rap music was the beat choice, and without good beats rap music simply would not have taken off to become the global artform that it now is. I’m not sure why rappers are now so keen to screw the pooch in this way, but RM has certainly noticed and he’ll now be dutifully riding that trend all the way down to whatever musical depths it’s going to take him. That’s pretty low as it happens, as this song varies between having completely shit beats and no beats at all, with RM either awkwardly stumbling his way through the awkward disjointed percussion, or even worse, trying to actually sing. Naturally he has to use about half a dozen pretty decent choir singers all working overtime on the track to cover for his croaky warbles, but even they can’t save this egocentric nonsense. Not that they even should, sometimes it’s best just to let bad music die.
28. V – FRI(END)S
Of course RM isn’t the only ex-BTS member making shit music (and let’s face it – they’re cooked at this point, even if they do reform it’ll just be some insincere “Forever 1” type thing) , V has been reliably pooping out rubbish tracks for the Kpopalypse worst lists for a while now, and here he is again, right on schedule. Jennie was obviously sick of him for whatever reason (I suspect not enough unsupervised walks along the river) so she’s dumped him, hence the theme of the song which is all about breaking up or whatever, and now we have to listen to him moping around being all sad and shit. Look, V, chin up bro, there’s no need to be so miserable about this. She did the same thing to me. She’s a heartbreaker! Just forget about her. You’ve got all that money, why don’t you just go and spend it some something nice and relax a bit, enjoy the single life. You’ll be hitched up with some k-pop girl again before you know it, so just take it easy, plenty of fish in the sea. Oh and no more new songs please until you’ve gotten your love life sorted out, I don’t think we’re ready for more of this pitiful crap, cheers.
27. J.Y. Park – Easy Lover
The good thing about JYP as a songwriter is that he’s very retro-minded, so we occasionally get some incredible old-school bangers from him, whether it be songs he’s written himself for his groups like the early Wonder Girls stuff, or other songs that he performs himself. The bad thing about JYP as a songwriter is also that he’s very retro-minded, so we sometimes have to put up with all the shit music from the past that he brings up that we’d rather forget even existed. In this case it’s some sterile “soul” junk that isn’t even as good as the terrible late 80s soul revival stuff it’s copying. While I’ve always been a bit hazy on exactly what the term “soul” means musically, it’s abundantly clear that this song both would fit seamlessly into the “soul” category in a record shop, and also doesn’t have any “soul” to speak of. On top of the general sterility, insincerity and lame, unimaginative melodic choices that are characteristic of anything remotely adjacent to “soul”, we have to watch JYP being a mega pervert in the video (as always) and I know that sounds hypocritical coming from a mega pervert like myself and it probably is, but I still don’t want to watch him do it. I suppose at least he’s being honest and I can’t really criticise that, so I hope he doesn’t mind if I’m also honest and tell him that his song is balls and he needs to pull up his plastic pants and give us some proper retro bangers again.
26. SUPER JUNIOR D&E – Go High
I can’t really remember, because I don’t try to follow who is making shit music any more than I absolutely have to for these lists, but I always had the impression that up until recently Super Junior D&E was a ballad unit or something. Clearly I didn’t get the memo becuase somewhere along the line they’ve transitioned to GD&TOP without the rizz. Since rizz was about 95% of the fuel that made GD&TOP function, what we’re left with here is basically just the ‘demo’ function on a workstation keyboard with a couple of shit buskers you don’t care about yelling over the top. I don’t need to listen to k-pop to experience that, I can just take a walk down the mall near where I live. I worked a job in that mall for a little while recently and I could hear buskers all day as I worked. The thing about buskers is that they often sound great when you pass them by quickly in the street while you’re doing your shopping, and that’s of course what they’re supposed to do, but when you are actually located in the same spot they are all day and you hear the same people do the same shit every single time you’re there, it all starts to sound a lot like Super Junior D&E do right here. Let’s not give them any coins and keep walking.
25. Beomhan – Me Myself & I
Beomhan “Me, Myself & I” is a song that many of you with your ear to the ground probably expected to be in this list, as its low quality is fairly well known among k-pop fans. Beomham himself notably apologised for the song’s existence, and even went so far as to release an “on mute” instrumental version so you could learn the dance steps without having to subject yourself to the song itself, so I can’t fault him for thoughtfulness. You might have even expected this song to be higher up in ths list, but honestly, 2024 had far worse songs than this. If anything, the mute version reveals that once you take away the overly forward, roughly delivered vocals, the backing track is at least acceptable in isolation, and an acceptable backing track goes a long way in a pop song. Various remixes of this song exist but most of them unnecessarily mess with the backing track while not really fixing the real problem with this because none of them seem to know how, the only remakes that are able to save this song are the ones where the vocal part is resung completely by someone else. K-pop’s idiotic legions of vocal-obsessed nerds (who would be better off following a style of music like opera where vocal technique actually matters, but whatever) apparently know everything there is to possibly know about “stability”, “resonance”, “head voice”, “vocal fry”, “nasality”, “tone” and a hundred other things but nobody’s talking about matching expression and articulation to music, a crucial point that most of these people don’t even discuss. Beomham is singing a romantic pop song in this massively forced, overarticulated way, with relatively dry effects other than pitch-correction, and the result makes him sound like a cross between Ronnie James Dio and Kraftwerk, which would actually be really cool, if only it suited the music. So that’s where the music then becomes the problem, which of course then makes the whole thing a problem, but hey at least Beomham acknowledged it. He may be struggling a bit with mental illness these days but he’s smart enough to know when he’s wrong, which means he’s probably smarter than the average k-pop fan and certainly smarter than the average k-pop agency, I hope he’s doing okay. I have more sympathy for him than the people who created most of the rest of the junk on this list and who should know better, that’s for sure.
24. ITZY – Gold
“Gold” comes rocking with big guitar stabs straight out of the gate and my first impressions from the intro of this song were that finally Itzy were investigating some actual rock music. Those hopes were dashed quickly when the actual singing started and everything then just collapsed into the usual trendy “let’s insert a bunch of random melodies that don’t even relate to each other, over some random beats that also don’t relate to each other either” thing that we’ve been putting up ever since Red Velvet made that sound popular for k-pop girl groups a decade ago. Of course Red Velvet do manage to get it at least half-right about 15% of the time because they often have the production style to paper over SM’s shit melody writing, but they still have a lot to answer for by inspiring every B-to-Z list group to make a few hundred thousand weak clones of their yelpy bullshit. Itzy however are no B-list group, or at least they’re not meant to be, they’re supposed to be “the next big thing after Twice” at least in theory, so how they seem to always get lumbered with song after song like this I have no idea. However it’s not like they’re always awful either – occasionally they do stumble across a song which shows that someone on their staff at least has an actual songwriter’s phone number, maybe next time they should write it down and keep it safe.
23. TRAX – To be continued
Ever since I started following Korean music back in the 2000s I’ve heard stories about TRAX and their supposed “legendary” status as a Korean rock group paving the way in Korea, as if they were some sort of Korean equivalent of the fantastic and pioneering Japanese power metal group X Japan. This comparison makes theoretical sense at least from a lore perspective, given that X Japan member Yoshiki had a hand in the formation of TRAX even though he was never part of the group itself. However none of the music I’ve ever heard from TRAX has ever come good on the promise implied by X Japan’s involvement, and watching this video, I think I now understand why. Obviously the boring coffee shop music here (a far cry even from X Japan’s excellent ballads, let alone their heavier classics) is a given, and the dreary nature of it really makes you wonder how this band’s name once stood for “The Typhoon Rose Attack Xmas”, but seeing the group having a video nostalgia-fest where they go through their old TRAX material seals the deal and underlines how they got to their current lack of relevance. They watch old VHS tapes of their previous activity and laugh in embarassment, and stare at old photos of themselves with the ex-members of the band carefully cropped out in SM’s usual typically paranoid and insulting “we have strong opinions about how we want our groups presented” style, like TRAX can’t even stand to be proud of their own image, let alone their own back catalogue or history. Of course that’s not TRAX’s fault but SM’s, and that’s the real problem with this. The entire attitude this was created with reeks of stuffy, boring conservative shamefulness, like your home group teacher who can’t admit to you that he uses the same high school drug dealer that you do even though it’s an open secret with everyone in your class. Nobody ever made great heavy metal by constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure they weren’t upsetting anyone and that they didn’t have a ‘kick me’ sign on their back. The fact is that every heavy metal group ever does wear that sign, but the good ones do it proudly and dare you to kick them, it’s a genre that thrives on excess, and it doesn’t work when people are too scared to be excessive. This shameful second-guessing and half-hearted “gosh we’d better not be too unapologetically interesting or we could upset someone” vibe is why TRAX ultimately failed, and with songs like this, that’s not going to change anytime soon.
22. HARMONIZE – Breather
Speaking of not being very interesting, here’s a group called “Harmonize” where there’s hardly any harmony and everyone’s doing gang vocals that are pitch-corrected to fuck, yay. Korea sure knows how to play it boring and safe. You can tell they’re selling this one on the “oh look, real vocal talent” thing, because they have one or two not-conventonally-attractive people in the group, and whenever that happens in mainstream Korean pop circles the unspoken elephant in the room implication is invariably “they’re clearly not here for their looks, so therefore it must be talent because we wouldn’t tolerate their ugly face otherwise”, Korea being the beauty-standards-addicted shithole that it is. But even setting aside the image and the fact that the song is obvious glee-club garbage and focusing only on the “talent” i.e the vocals (because that’s all dumb k-pop fans think talent means), there’s not even that much to see here. These blues warbles are well within the grasp of even an average vocalist, and having more people singing on a track is actually easier than having less people singing, because all the little mistakes get averaged out, just ask anyone who sucked at school choir but still passed. Not that there are even any audible mistakes here anyway, because all of that is quantised and pitch-adjusted by computers now, it’s as smoothed-over and unexciting as their clothing, with everyone somehow dressing different and yet still looking the same, with their clothing carefully colour-matched so nobody gets too excited lest a shade of too-bright primary colour pop out and give some poor old fuck at the video editing controls a heart attack. We wouldn’t want to get too excited now, and there certainly isn’t anything to get the heart pumping any extra blood here.
21. Aespa – Get Goin’
Aespa had some fantastic songs in 2024 that really changed the game of A-list k-pop in some exciting ways, (finally) bringing back fast, punchy, exciting music to the forefront after several years of “in your area” slow dreariness polluting k-pop from just about everyone. *Fraggle Noises and Reactions* Unfortunately, aespa also had “Get Goin’”, a devastatingly crap collaboration with Fraggle Rock, an 80s Muppets spin-off that was all about making social messaging cool for the kids and whatnot (also see: the original Star Wars trilogy, every superhero comic ever released, etc). *Fraggle Noises and Reactions* I like the idea at least in theory – if today’s male teenagers had gotten some proper education from a TV muppet instead of YouTube’s autoplay feature when they were growing up, they might not have ended up being scammed so heavily by an actual muppet like Andrew Tate and his “you can be GTA cosplay just like me if you buy my course and pay for my easily-hackable Discord clone” bullshit. *Fraggle Noises and Reactions* Maybe with a bit more Fraggle in the world there’s hope for the next generation to get it right and not become marks and suckers as easily hoodwinked by social engineering as their grandparents. *Fraggle Noises and Reactions* However it would help if the soundtrack to convince them was any good, and this tired, cheesy 12-bar blues with limp instrumentation and cringe Fragglecompaniment definitely doesn’t have what it takes to get anyone interested in anything, least of all the girls of aespa who definitely look like they’re phoning it in, barely able to keep their lips up to the pace when miming along to the backing track. *Fraggle Noises and Reactions* It had some limited potential, but if you’re going to go down such a tired musical path you’d better bring something beefier sonically to the table than a bunch of cartoon voices – if only the backing track really was “back to the rock” we could have maybe had something decent here. *Fraggle Noises and Reactions*
20. Ferry Blue – Everything Is You
Ferry Blue had a pretty bad 2023 and they’re still around in 2024 being generally really awful. This song sucks right out of the gate when it’s plainly evident that it’s going to become one of those “tropical shithouse” things, but then in the chorus the tropical slop gets shunted into the background and vocals are sung over it instead, I guess because someone worked out at the 11th hour that tropical house hasn’t been trending upward in music since 2017 but nobody had time to rewrite the backing track so they just mixed it down a bit. This doesn’t actually improve the song any because now we have two confused melodies fighting for space to be heard over the beat instead of one. It’s all pretty unlisteable in usual Ferry Blue Z-tier style and it definitely made me feel sorry for these girls who definitely deserve something better than this, unlike you, they didn’t have a choice about whether they had to hit the play button or not. I suggest that you exercise your right to better music and just keep reading.
19. Jay Park – Your/My
While I’ve always had mixed feelings about AI for various reasons and have made this clear previously, plenty of people I know are very upbeat and positive about the future of AI at the moment, often alarmingly so. There’s Microsoft who are insistent that “AI agents” are going to replace all apps everywhere (including their own shitty easily-hackable apps, which they seem oddly happy about), tons of clickbait YouTubers spamming that we already have an “artificial general intelligence” and here it is right now as long as you move the goalposts a bit thanks so much for the clicks and engagement don’t forget to like and subscribe, and psychotic “techno optimists” insistent that everything’s going to be just awesome as long as you let them do whatever they want and don’t try to involve inconvenient ethics or guardrails in whatever particular patch they happen to be working in at the moment. I think that the world needs a bit of a reality check about this stuff, and I think I might just have the solution right here. I really do feel that a soulless-sounding, R&B balladeering Jay Park with computer-smoothed vocals, computer-smoothed skin and AI tattoo-removal might just the thing to convince the USA’s big tech monopolies that perhaps following the AI Pied Piper down into the deep learning sewer might lead to some dark places. There is literally nothing about this entire package that feels human in any manner, in fact I’m convinced that Jay Park himself was replaced by a Stepford-Wife style automaton some years ago, that must be why he’s holding out on the soju for my girlfriend that I asked him for after he opened his OnlyFans. Surely the real Jay would be much more of a gentleman and if nothing else send me a polite rejection letter. In the meantime let’s reject this song until the real Jay Park emerges from sniffing his mail-ordered Shien Girl’s Day underwear replicas and makes an actual song again.
18. Holland – Bitch he’s mine
I think about Holland often, but mainly when I’m looking at gay porn on BlueSky. Not that I go searching for gay porn on BlueSky, it just tends to find me anyway. You see, some clever people have managed to hack the BlueSky algorithms so that whenever I look at my k-pop feed, the usual fancams, chart position updates and naive insistence that streaming your bias on a regular schedule actually does something of significance is punctuated by pictures of men with absolutely massive erect penises slapping other men in the face with them. Anyway that’s my excuse for looking all day at buff men flexing their huge cocks the length and breadth of a shampoo bottle (one guy literally held his schlong up to a shampoo bottle to prove that the comparison was legit, it was genuinely impressive but he must get frustrated because I think he’d get a lot of rejections for medical reasons) and I’m sticking to it. So Holland comes to mind when I see these things, and it was originally because he’s in k-pop media and he’s gay, just like these pictures of various dudes poking each other’s holes with their big meaty shafts. However now it’s transformed and I now think of him also because listening to this confused mess of weird unmusical wailing and odd tempo changes that just sort of fucks around and does whatever it wants regardless of how you’re feeling about it must surely feel like being an anal virgin twink in the middle of some of these homosexual gangbangs I’ve been looking at. I wonder if that’s the idea or if it’s just coincidence. Knowing how thirsty for random male idols Holland generally is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a marketing tactic. Good luck Holland, and if you feel like doing an interview sometime I’m right here.
17. I.M – Skyline
Keeping on the sexy theme and here we have I.M who is allegedly here to “take off your bad thoughts like I took your shirts off”, and generally croon away like a robot with the robot voice selling himself as hot and ready to go (although he’s all talk, probably). The shit lyrics and horrible backing track are par for the course in this style, but what makes I.M’s version of robot-voiced “sexy” R&B more disturbing than almost everyone else who does it is the way he’s singing it. It’s a bit mysterious to me that poor Beomham got so much flak for his shit song’s asspaper voice but I.M got a free pass for sounding like he’s deepthroating Holland while singing this, and I’m definitely not against it but some things just aren’t meant to be done together. Just think about how he actually got “thoughts” to rhyme with “shirts off”, the only way he could have possibly done that is by pushing a big meaty shaft right past his uluva while vocalising in order to bend his vocal folds in the appropriate direction, like that gay porn I was watching the other day on this Twitter channel that I can’t remember the name of now (my account’s deactive but I still lurk there because the pornstars haven’t made the switch yet) where there’s these three twinks and two of them are always bullying the other one who pretends he’s a virgin and it’s his first time in every single video even though they have like a gazillion videos on their channel and he’s getting all his holes filled in every single one… sorry, I’m still thinking about that Holland song. I guess it made a real impression on me. Anyway where was I? Oh yeah this song sucks even more dick than my Twitter feed. Next.
16. UDTT – Retry
A terrifyingly bad song that squeezed into this list right at the end of the year, “Retry” is on the surface just the usual generic mid-tempo slop these girl groups tend to get, but it suffers from a flaw that’s fairly unusual in k-pop, where if nothing else producers tend to get the sonic side right. Most of this song is punctuated by big, beefy stabs (sorry I’ll try to stop thinking about Holland now) of brass and they really get in the way of the rest of the song, they’re so loud that they’re seriously fighting for space with the vocals, a rare situation for k-pop where the backing track is actually given too much importance in the mix. Of course obfuscating those crappy vocal melodies probably wouldn’t be a bad thing in a lot of cases, but what they’re replacing them with isn’t any good either, so it’s this weird situation of two completely sucky musical elements constantly colliding with each other in the same frequency space. While there’s the hope that in the fight they might erase each other completely, in fact the reverse happens and the shitness compounds, plus on top of that the whole thing’s just so slow and plodding. On first listen it admittedly doesn’t seem that annoying and you might be even surprised by how high the song is in this list, but try listen to the thing the amount of times that I listen to each and every song that goes into these lists, and you’ll see it differently. It’s like water torture, what starts off as a tiny detail gradually magnifies until its all you can think about, and soon you’ll be repeating those clunky brass chords to yourself mentally at 3am when you’re frantically twitching and trying to get to sleep. It’s a shame because they do get a few other important elements right, like the outfits, which are simple and effective and I hope when it’s time for their next song the songwriters take a leaf out of the costume designer’s book and learn the value of some minimalism, here’s hoping.
15. BADVILLAIN – Badtitude
Hey k-pop producers, if you want a little bit of free promo, here’s one way to make a shit k-pop track that will guarantee you worst-list inclusion on the popular Kpopalypse end of year lists. Start by getting Blackpink’s “Whistle“, by far the worst song in that group’s catalog. Then, remove the melodic whistle, which was actually the only catchy part of that song even though it did also kinda suck tremendous ass, and replace it with just one high whistly kind of drone thing that cuts in every now and then. Then remove what little vocal melody that song had and replace it with a bunch of really stupid chanting. You can get the girls to say pretty much anything, it doesn’t matter, as long as they all do it at once and there’s some vague kind of synchronisation to it, and match it with a dance move so the kids dig it. And there you go! Don’t worry I’m sure this will be very successful.
14. V with Park Hyo Shin – Winter Ahead
HYBE’s attempts to sell V (also known as BTS’s Taehyung – I’m just mentioning that for the readers who don’t suck at the corporate teat of always-online BTS fan culture all day) as some kind of Frank Sinatra clone seem hilarious on the surface, but there’s actually a grain of common sense to it when you think about it. After all Frank Sinatra pretty much “talk-sung” through his entire career so that more or less matches with V who can’t sing his way out of a wet paper bag when the computer-correction isn’t on. Frank also relied heavily on having a lot of muscle on the payroll in order to maintain his position at the top, so that fits with HYBE and their borderline criminal shenanigans like hiring US PR firms that specialise in creating misogynist false media campaigns to help smear their enemies. Also both Frank and V appreciate a good cigarette after a hard day of mumbling their way through songs, so there’s that. The final piece in the jigsaw puzzle is the music, Frank’s songs were all your grandparents’ music and only ever sounded good when covered properly by a nice upstanding person with a decent voice and some actual charisma, and the same goes with V although I doubt we’ll see too many good covers of “Winter Ahead” because I’m just not sure how well power chords would go with this. All up, I have to admit that positioning V as this generation’s Frank Sinatra actually makes a great deal of sense, so cheers to HYBE and their creative vision, Bang Si-hyuk is clearly a very smart man. Now let’s never listen to this song again.
13. Lim Kim – ULT
When I did my “Asian but not Korean, not pop, not world music” feature over the course of 2024, I laid down the rules of inclusion specifically in that way because I wanted to get away from stereotypes of “Asianness” and show Asian people making music in all sorts of contexts that didn’t lean on fetishisation of Asian cultural heritage as a marketing factor. Lim Kim is the complete opposite of that, and she has been a regular feature on these worst lists ever since she dumped actual pop songs in favour of self-conscious Asian identity politics and quasi-feminist sloganeering for fashion label bucks. Obviously this nonsense is 100% Lim Kim’s bag, as an independent artist she’s following her passion and that’s just great, pity her passion is posing out in a “look at me I’m so Asian in an Asian country, gosh how bold, I am breaking boundaries” kind of way while singing an empty bunch of major pentatonic warbles over an empty-ass backing track. It’s par for the course with all of her more recent songs, they all just feel like her selling herself to the audience as this “Asian queen” figure over and over again and it has the energy of Donald Trump saying he won the election in 2020 when dozens of court cases and scientifically peer-reviewed data all proved that he didn’t. Trump and Lim Kim both seem to know that if you repeat wrong information publicly enough times and with enough confidence, eventually people will start to believe it even without evidence, it’s a known propaganda trick called the “illusory truth effect” and it’s surprisingly powerful. Who knows what would happen if Lim Kim ever got into politics in Korea, I actually think she’d be rather good at it, given how readily the rest of the Korean media world laps up this kind of bullshit.
12. MEOVV – MEOW
And then there are songs which don’t really require any explanation as to why they’re on this list, however it seems that some people might need one anyway. Looking through the YouTube comments for this video is interesting, it’s full of people saying stuff along the lines of “I don’t understand why so many people don’t like this song, I think it’s great”. These folks seem genuinely confused, so let me break it down for their benefit why some people might not like this song very much. The main problem with this is that the song follows the same boring Blackpink template that we’re all well and truly sick of by now, which is: verse with lame pentatonic meoldies – vaguely acceptable prechorus – dogshit chorus full of dumb yelping and daft catchphrases – second verse but this time it’s a stupid kiddy rap for fuckheads – same prechorus and chorus as before, still sucks just as much – weird bit at the end where the song incorporates some completely different section for no reason. Now that actually worked pretty well for Blackpink at least 30% of the time because they sometimes had some killer production sonics that were able to paper over the cracks elsewhere – but “Meow” doesn’t have the benefit of production that is good enough to craft an engaging sonic landscape to make up for the lack of interesting melody and harmony. These limp beats that are barely more than some sub-bass over a weak drum pattern just don’t have enough substance to them to gloss over the general emptiness and soullessness of what’s on offer. Of course it doesn’t help that the lyrics are the usual materialistic corporate dick-sucking bullcrap designed for a society chasing its own Gucci-clad tail into irrelevence, but the best lyrics in the world couldn’t have saved this. So I hope that clears things up, for anyone wondering. You’re welcome.
11. TVXQ! – Dearest
Since this song sucks, and SM Entertainment deserve to be punished for its existence, rather than just write a review shitting on it, which would be correct but boring, I’d like to use this space to remind you of the following, in order to discipline those involved:
Wikipedia page on TVXQ, detailing TVXQ’s dispute with SM Entertainment over unfair contract terms which led to three members of the five member group leaving
More information on the contract terms and monetary compensation amounts TVXQ were paid for activities
Detailed legal breakdown of SM’s contract with TVXQ
Actual TVXQ contract from 2009
A four-part podcast detailing the events around the lawsuit
Article about the “JYJ law” which was passed to stop SM Entertainment from interfering in activities of the ex-TVXQ members post the group split, something they were of course found guilty of doing by the Korean courts
Proof that SM Entertainment actively continues to do what it can to silence people talking about TVXQ’s history and the issues around this contract dispute
SM low-lighting TVXQ’s five member history in SM museum’s TVXQ exhibit
A thread of some old pre-split TVXQ photos for you to enjoy
You’re welcome.
(If any SM Entertainment staff would like to me to remove this pro-OT5 TVXQ review and replace it with a more generic shitting-on-the-song type review, here’s a link to my Ko-fi, please subscribe at the Illuminati or Elon Musk tier and I will consider it, thank you.)
10. Sik-K, HAON, Leellamarz – KC (Bust It Down)
Seriously, what are those lame squeaky noises coming out of these guys’ mouths? I feel like Korean rap is about to have its 645AR moment, and this is just a stepping stone on the way there, so we should oppose it. I had to throw out my old office chair because it was starting to make noises like this every time I was in my room fapping to that Chodan photoshoot and it would wake my cat up, because my cat thought the noise from my chair was another cat. Now my cat wakes up to this shit song instead, sorry kitty but it’s not another cat, and it’s not Chodan either, it’s just a fail rap song except this one has weird squeaking in it. Somewhere in there there’s also a beat that sucks, but that’s par for the course with rap in 2024 where nobody can write beats anymore, it’s the squeaking that really hits hard here. One day science may be able to tell us what these rappers are trying to say but until then, only my cat knows.
9. MYTRO – Bomb Bomb Bomb
Apparently this is a trot group that SM Entertainment have something to do with, and it’s really weird to me how SM are failing so hard here. I mean what is this semi-reggaeton semi-Latin piece of shit, really, certainly not something I would expect from the “future of neo culture technology” label that’s inventing new planets and shit. We’re they around back when idol pop first started out and when it was pretty much all trot groups? They should know better than this, in fact out of all the k-pop labels they’re probably the ones with the least possibility of a valid excuse. To be clear, I’m definitely not against trot and several trot performers have graced the Kpopalypse favourites lists in past years, but I am when it’s combined with shitty styles that don’t suit it. This song is definitely a bomb bomb bomb.
8. SPIA – Daddy’s Little Girl
Trends in k-pop go in cycles, but within that cycle, there’s also a significant time delay, and this delay varies depending on several factors. The first delay is the distance between when a sound trends in the western music world and when it hits the bigger artists in Korean pop. This timeframe has shortened as time has gone on, but it’s still significant, and the reason for its existence is implied in the information by k-pop producer AZODi provided in my interview with him – there’s a collaborative process that usually happens when making a k-pop song that takes significant time as many elements have to come together to work in tandem, so by the time a brand new sound sees the light of day in k-pop, it’s not as brand new anymore because the track had to jump through so many hoops to get to release stage. Then there’s a longer delay which is when the lower-tier agencies get their shot at the same sound. These agencies tend to be behind the big labels in terms of music fashion, because a big agency can afford to take chances on a newer sound that may or may not work and with any luck help set a trend, but a smaller agency runs on a tighter budget and has more to lose, so they’re less likely to take their chances with new sounds because they can’t afford the financial strain of failure – they’ll instead watch what the big labels do and once a new sound is deemed a “sure thing”, they’ll follow through with their own “safe” budget versions. The less money involved, the more cautious a label has to be, so by the time something like the “in your area” slow funeral jam sound finally winds its way down to a group on Spia’s “barely above Kpopalypse Nugu Alert territory” tier, the popularity of the original style is long gone. The girls may incessantly sing “you know you want it”, but if you did even want this confused mess at all, it was probably around ten years ago.
7. AOORA – Thi Thi Thara (Kuttanadan dreams) ft. Sireesha Bhagavatula, FRIDAYYY, Mellow Kitchen
Every time I see Aoora do a song, I’m always tempted to write some more about how much I dislike Edward “LSWF” Avila, because these two are collaborators or some shit, but he doesn’t seem to be involved in this song, so I guess I’ll just have to assess Aoora on his own merits this time. That’s bad news for Aoora, because now he doesn’t get to dodge the literary punches that Eddie the fat-shamer has been taking to the torso each time either of them fart in my general direction, as Aoora doesn’t seem to have too many musical merits to speak of, or at least they’re not demonstrated here. This music we’re dealing with here is somewhere between the kind of lame ambient dance pop that you’d hear on a holiday infomercial, and the equally lame 20 year old bhangra music that my Indian flatmates would always bump in their rooms back when I used to live in an international student residence. Then just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, there’s the sax riffs that make an appearance and make everything sound even more shit. I don’t know who the other people involved in this are, or who is responsible for what, but I do want to find out where this was shot so I can make sure that I never go there.
6. Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra – Psycho (Orchestra Ver.)
There’s a lot of things that SM Entertainment has done right over the years, and a lot of things they’ve done wrong. One of their worst ventures is their recent obsession with creating symphonic classical music of their past hits. I think the idea is that dabbling in “art music” (eww) is supposed to give them extra artistic credibility or something, but in an age where people are working out that classical music doesn’t actually have any intrinsic artistic prestige other than what it’s been arbitrarily assigned in academic circles, I think that’s an outdated concept. However I also don’t mind orchestral music when it’s done right, so I’d have no problem with SM going down this path if the results were musically any good. The thing is, they’re not, because the people in charge of this project haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re even doing. Almost every single SM “orchestral version” is basically the same bullshit – the composer getting the main themes of the tune, “developing” them in a bunch of different unwelcome ways and turning the whole thing into a barely-related butchered wank of instrumental excursions, where every instrument “gets their shot” (because feeding the ego of each and every individual musician is important, whereas you the listener are not important, in fact fuck you) and the catchiness of the original music is thrown down the drain. While SM do this with almost every song their accursed contracted orchestra touches, nowhere does this hurt more than with Red Velvet’s “Psycho“, an excellent song that already had a quite good orchestral arrangement in its original version. All the orchestral arranger had to do was basically follow the bouncing ball, recreate the tune’s original arrangement exactly as written and just fill it out more with the orchestra’s extra arsenal of powerful instruments, they did not need to turn it into a massive unrelated schmaltzy wankfest, but they did because this is SM Entertainment’s orchestral project where everything is about keeping up appearances and proving “look how well we can play” instead of making good music. Truly pathetic, and a pure insult to every Red Velvet fan as well as every music lover in general.
5. Clear:i – Quest
Truly an awful song on every level, the bad songs in 2024 were in fact really shit and it’s amazing to me that I managed to find four songs even worse than this fucking crud. I’m told that Clear:i are a group made up of some former members of a group called Botopass, who were themselves made up of former members of a group called iLuv, who were in some bullying controversy where a girl called Minah who they allegedly bullied attempted suicide multiple times, and that’s why all the comments on this video on YouTube are all shitting on not just the song for being crap but the girls for being bullies. Of course I can’t verify any of the claims about the group directly, but what I can verify is that when I pressed play on this song I was definitely bullied by some horribly written vocal melodies, bland track-writing, poorly-mixed singing and some laughable extra-vocal details that really sound out of place. What is that voice doing at 2:51, is that a burp or a fart? Why is the count-in at 0:07 intoned so weakly, like the song is almost apologising for existing? The whole thing makes no sense and sounds no good, this is definitely a song that owes me my lunch money, whoever songwriter was involved in creating this mess someone tell me what school they go to and I’ll meet them outside the front gate after class. I’m sure we can come to an understanding.
4. Homies – D.I.E
I know this is only a very short video, the actual audio for this track goes for a longer duration, but trust me that when you hear this you’ll quickly agree that there’s no reason to listen to the long version, or for me to even go into why this song is the absolute worst of the worst in rap music this year, so I won’t even bother. I do want to take this time out however to let people know that the purchasing of needless chunks of jewelry is one of the main reasons why a lot of rappers go broke, and several of them consider these type of purchases to be their biggest regrets later in their careers. Still, there’s a sucker born every minute, and “Homies” (what a name, sheesh) definitely are making some jeweller out there very happy. I don’t know who needs to hear this, hopefully none of you, but in the words of Ice-T, “better get some real estate, motherfucker“.
3. LIONESSES – Like Christina Taught Me
The “Christina” in the tile of this song is Christina Aguilera and the reference here is apparently to her song “Beautiful“, which is supposed to be about loving yourself and all that sort of thing. I don’t know if musicians are where you should be getting your life lessons though, if there’s one thing I’ve learned through decades of working with musicians, it’s that they don’t actually know shit and they’re just as prone to falling into the same mental traps as any one of the rest of us. If you’re getting your ideology from someone who wrote a song that you like, regardless of the content of the song, it’s dangerous territory. In this case self-love might seem like a harmless enough belief system, but before you go all in on the loving of yourself, just do a quick spot check first to make sure you haven’t released a song as awful as this. Now to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Lionesses go and quit music or anything like that, and honestly I quite like it that they exist and I support their general LGBT mission in the k-pops which I think is very good. However I can’t help but feel that just a little bit of self-doubt could have actually gone a long way in the studio when they were recording this, to actually improve the song. Just questioning whether the audience really wants to hear that same strained high-note sung over and over again in the same annoying vocal inflection could have potentially saved a lot of people a lot of heartache, or at least earache. I really want to like what they’re doing but almost every song of theirs has that same incredibly annoying vocal melody where they just go up to the sky all the time in that same ball-tigehtening melodic contour and it really is an ugly, ugly listen. Next time maybe try to get music lessons from Christina rather than the self-love lessons, not that I’m in love with her music either or even know what it sounds like (I’ve got too much k-pop backlog to listen to to have time for that shit) but damn it’s got to be at least slightly better than this.
2. ASTELL – Island
By the time you’re reading this, Astell have already disbanded after releasing this song and nothing else at all, and that’s the sad reality of k-pop – many new groups only get one shot at being a k-pop, so when you shoot your shot, it had better be good because there’s no guarantee of a second chance. Of course, many groups are in an even worse position and never get to debut at all, but that would have been a more fortunate fate for Astell than the total humiliation of having to release the trash that is “Island”. This is a song where the producers got literally every single aspect wrong. Horrible vocal melodies, bad singing that will make you beg for them to turn the Autotune on for a change, cringe rapping (“look at the star!”), limp beats with no groove, and worst of all a chorus with zero melody to speak of that’s dominated by an absolutely terrible keyboard synth sound. They didn’t mess the video up quite as much as the song, as the styling isn’t too bad and the editor is at least trying hard to make the best of what little there is to work with, but there’s no hiding how impoverished the entire package is. There’s no doubt that Astell had no choice but to disband because there was no hope of generating return on investment from this junk and they just ran out of money to try again.
But even that’s not as bad as the worst song on this list, which is…
1. Naevis – Done
DId I mention earlier in this list that SM Entertainment have done a lot of wrong things over the years? Yes, I believe I did, and yes they sure are getting a roasting in the list this year but I don’t feel too bad about it because they truly deserve it and have earned it. I guess that’s the price you pay for always trying to be at the forefront of everything, you’re also going to be the first one to walk into whatever massive fucking techbro-hyped disaster is just waiting for the first sucker. SM Entertainment’s market position on innovation in the k-pop sphere is therefore like that of the first person to play Squid Game’s 16-stage glass-tile hopscotch of death, where the odds of a positive result without fucking up massively are 1 in 65536. Here SM dive headfirst into the latest trend sweeping moronic side-hustle grifter culture which is AI-simulation dicksucking avatar bullshit, and the results are phenomenally awkward and unlistenable. SM palm some shit ballad presumably originally earmarked for aespa off onto Naevis, some awful looking CGI avatar which looks like Winter’s head stapled onto Karina’s body and then given a Mark Zuckerberg meta-makeover, and I guess it’s just as well for the aespa girls that SM made that decision because they sure dodged a bullet here. Who knows what the fuck they’ve used to voice the thing, mind you the voice doesn’t sound any more sterile and useless than any given idol after all the pitch-correction and smoothing that’s generally applied to their raw vocals before anyone dare release it into the wild, lest they sound just like the Astell girls. We should probably be grateful. As stupid and misguided as all the AI stuff is, it’s obviously the human-created song itself which is the real problem – laughably maudlin, dreary, plodding, with leaden beats, terrible melodies that sound like pulling teeth and lyrics that are far beyond stupid. While the music and lyrics aren’t AI-written, maybe they should have been, because as flawed as they sometimes are it’s hard to imagine a neural network fucking up more than this. In fact never mind AI, I don’t even think that I could fuck up this badly if I tried. As bad as my writing can get in the eyes of the legions of hypocritical conservative prudes who infest k-pop social media, none of what I’ve written has ever topped “watch me come ’til I’m numb, pain pain undone” for disturbing creepiness (although maybe I’ll rise to that challenge in 2025 just to piss off some more people for laughs), and that’s one of the lines in this song that makes the most amount of sense. Truly, SM have shit the bed with this song and nobody’s coming to clean the sheets anytime soon, they are “done” indeed.
That’s the end of this list! Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t been reduced to a quivering wreck with no hearing or sanity left from these shit songs, please proceed directly to the Kpopalypse favourites list for 2024 in order to restore your faith in k-pop and your mental health! Kpopalypse will return in 2025!
