It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Sena from ADYA apparently is a school bully according to… random-ass people on the Internet. Where’s Iseul’s limousine to sort this type of thing out.
GFRIEND – Always
Another frankly disappointing song from the reunited Gfriend, and it’s still abundantly clear HYBE doesn’t give a single shit about them, but for once the lazy-ass “modelling shoot disguised as a music video” trick pays off because if there’s anyone you want to see modelling random clothes for no reason it’s definitely Gfriend.
BBGIRLS – Love 2
The song’s just okay, but the video is absolutely inspired, watching BBGirls reunite through strings-and-tin-can communication sounds exactly like the kind of joke that I’d write in one of these roundups that all the idiots on social media would cry pathetically over. Good to know that BBGirls have the sense of humour that their fans don’t.
BABYMONSTER – Really Like You
Credit to whoever is behind the new BabyMoster song because it IS different to what they’ve tried so far. Unfortunately it’s not the good kind of different. Also it’s only January and we already have a contender for the most shittily memeable k-pop kiddy-rap phrase of the year, watch all the k-pop kiddies complain that I’m anti-black because I like KRS-ONE and Public Enemy but don’t like their bias rapping “ding diggy ding like a liggy ding ding”. At least DAS EFX had decent beats.
GOT7 – Python
I didn’t completely hate this because I thought some of the keyboard textures were nice, and that actually makes it a pleasant enough listen just on its own. Not wild about anything else here though, and definitely let down by a lack of pythons in the video. They really needed a big snake moving across the screen from one side to the other at both the start and end of the video just so you know that it’s not a song about anything other than snakes.
KickFlip – Mama Said…
Absolute poop from the first note to the last. Mama said get a better song.
ZEROBASEONE (ZB1) – Now or Never
At first I facepalmed because it sounded like we were in shit ballad territory, but the song picked up quickly and tuned out to be pretty rocking. Pity about the lame pre-chorus drops that every song seems to have to have now. Like 90 year olds in North Korea who remember the days before the dictatorship but get thrown in prison and tortured just for talking about it, I’ll continue to advocate for fast songs having beats and sticking to them.
ZEROBASEONE (ZB1) – Doctor! Doctor!
Sorry doctor, you got here after the songwriting meeting, we can’t save this one. We’re going to have to put it down.
ONEUS – IKUK
The bass player is really working overtime here to try and carry this mediocre song, and the bassline is so slippery and groovy that it almost works.
ALL(H)OURS – Graffiti
I love what they wrote on those plastic sheets. “The set director told us to write some graffiti, just like, tagging and spray paint… gosh so what do we write?” They really didn’t have any ideas at all, did they.
WEi – Not Enough
That thumbnail reminds me of this video I saw once where a US soldier in Iraq was clearing the inside of a building and got shot at by a sniper from outside a window, and it was a perfectly accurate shot straight for his head but the bullet didn’t end up hitting him because it had lost so much energy in flight that it just bounced off the glass window he was behind. Or maybe the sniper was just using nerf bullets, I dunno, you Americans are all experts in guns so you’ve probably already seen the video and know exactly what happened and will probably send me 57 comments correcting the stuff I got wrong here. Anyway I think nerf guns are great and a few snipers with foam bullets camped outside the boardrooms of k-pop agencies might just be the motivation the Korean industry needs.
BTOB – Hi Beautiful
Ah, “for the fans” is back. I like how they say at the start of this one that “the love we have for their fans is so great that we couldn’t put it into words, so we made this song… which has a bunch of words in it, because we’re just talking nonsense really, just keep coming to our concerts and buying our shit thanks”. Okay, they didn’t say that, but in an honest world they would have.
The Kingdom – Warning
Someone asked me today if I’d review a song for roundup that was released as a single but had no music video. I said that while technically it is eligible, I like to hold off on reviews like that for as long as possible because video content is more interesting to feature, and sometimes agencies are just very late to making videos. Case in point is The Kingdom here, this song is actually three years old and it just gets a video now for some reason. Maybe this is their way of apologising to Australians for cancelling that Australian tour they were very adamant we go and support when I saw them live the other month. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure they did this song at that show too and it doesn’t sound bad in video context but I think it works better as a live song. Also points off for no hanboks. although the suits do look okay this is not going to make me gay.
VVUP – 4 Life
Keeping on the “late ass videos” point, this one has fucking Christmas trees in it. It’s bad luck to keep Christmas decorations up for more than 12 days after Christmas is over, and I think it’s equally bad luck to have Christmas decorations in videos for boring songs released well into the new year.
Kim Wansun & Seulgi – Lucky
They get the sound and look right, but the song itself, not so much. Leaning back into retro 80s style doesn’t work that well if you also include all the lame trends from the current pop era like needless pre-chorus drops and a really good instrumental section at the end that should have been integrated into the song itsef but wasn’t.
Jungseul feat. Shindong – Tabom
Shindong’s hamming it up makes this latin nonsense tolerable. Pity he didn’t take a few seconds out of video-shooting time to teach her how to use a damn microphone.
Slushii x HYO – Money
Why is Hyoyeon a computer avatar instead of a person in like 50% of all her videos? Being in the same group as Rachel Kim for all those years must have really made her self-conscious. Mind you I’d want to hide my face too if I was responsible for this mess.
Odetari with Hongjoong of ATEEZ – SMB
What the fuck is this.
Jinjoo Park, Ailee, Mijoo, Haewon – Is it still beautiful
It’s not that beautiful if you couldn’t even be bothered standing.
Onew – Boy
Onew’s been throwing out a song a week lately, but this one’s just average. Someone tell the man that he doesn’t have to release literally everything.
Kandis – Playground
Sometimes the most awful song has the best beat.
Dept x Pretzelle – Tell Me
Dept is Korean and Pretzelle are from Thailand and they are here to prove to you that not all Thai-Korean collabs are worth listening to.
HYNN – Unspoken Goodbye
Hynn’s new ballad is dreary as expected and her video is full of poop AI snow effects so let’s have our non-Korean LGBT feature here instead! This week’s it’s Limp Wrist, and I couldn’t pick just one song from them so why not have an entire live set, performed in a church no less (not all Christians are anti-gay, you know). There’s quite a lot of LGBT representation in punk music (and you’d better believe you’ll be finding out all about it in Kpopalypse roundups this year) but Limpwrist wear their heart (and their asscheeks) on their sleeve in ways that a lot of other groups don’t and they certainly have a way with song titles and lyrics. The straight-edge hardcore punk scene is notoriously boringly conservative and anti-sexual, something they actually have in common with k-pop fans, but Limp Wrist are fighting back like the hardcore punk equivalent of Holland, pushing the gayness in your face until you can’t take it, and then doing it just a little more… and then a lot more. Recommended.
Nam Taehyun – On the Edge of the Night
Are you fucking kidding? What a bunch of boring crap.
An Shinae – South to the West
Zero song here to speak of, just a bunch of blues vocal improvs trying to pass itself off as something more. Note Hwasa in the video for no reason, which kind of fits I guess as this song sucks for the same reason that a lot of Mamamoo’s songs also suck.
Dynamic Duo, Gummy – Take Care
Dymanic Duo pissing their status as rap legends down the drain as usual with this boring weak slow soft shit. Their musical bladders must surely be nearing empty by now.
Giriboy – You Get Out
no u
XWALLY – Better Day
Just your public service announcement that shit music like this still is being made and the people who make it haven’t gone away.
ALL THE SHIT UNIVERSE LEAGUE SONGS IN ONE SECTION SO YOU CAN SKIP IT ALL FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH IF YOU WANT
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Butterfly
I don’t follow this shit Universe League show, but I guess we’re past the “expose how badly they can sing for audience engagement purposes” section of the show and well into the “look how hard they’ve worked since then, we didn’t just turn the pitch correction on, pinky swear” section at this point.
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Only U
All the songs for this Universe League thing are just kind of exceptionally average and competent and not exciting at all.
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Don’t Hit The Brakes
Okay, I take that back, this one’s a bit shit, not sure what they were thinking.
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Roller Coaster
By the way the next Kpopalypse book is going to be all about a survival show so I hope you enjoy it. I realised that audition and ‘survival’ processes was a really big hole in the Shin Hana series of books so I thought I’d do a new one that was just covering off that stuff. Enjoy the torture later this year when it happens.
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – On&On
I feel like they’re trying to do the early SHINee sound here to some extent, and it kind of works but the backing track is a little undercooked to have the right impact. 99.999999% of k-pop lives and dies on the instrumental NOT the vocals (because vocals are and always have been and always will be a secondary concern for pop songwriters, which is just how it should be), and here they just didn’t pay enough attention to giving the backing track its due.
UNIVERSE LEAGUE – My, My, My
Here’s the last one and I stopped listening to his halfway through because Nickleback came up in my recommends and I actually clicked on it and watched the whole thing instead, that’s how uninteresting this was.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
Jeewon talks Waterbomb on “No Bbaku Tak Jae Hoon” Season 2 EP.66 ENG SUB
Because I keep talking about it in posts, here’s the full episode of Jeewon talking about Waterbomb, along with English subs nicely provided by a lovely reader. The “evil edit” that went viral on Twitter as “proof” that Jeewon disapproved of Waterbomb/was uncomfortable about the questioning was manufactured by someone stitching together the question about Waterbomb at 5:36 (which Jeewon responds to by saying she’d love to do it) with Jeewon’s reaction to a completely different question at 8:24 (about her groupmates groping her in the dorms). This means that the yearly comic that accompanies my “most fappable music video post” is actually more correctly in context than all those #protectJeewon viral videos, which all just completely lied about the situation to suit their own agenda. You’d think k-pop fans would be smart enough to be on the lookout for evil editing given everything that survival shows have taught them, but I guess you can never underestimate the pure stupidity of a k-pop fan. Feel free to use this video example in your media studies class.
Do you feel like a shark?
A reader said they would pay for someone to overlay Oh My Girl’s “Shark” onto the Jaws trailer, so I did just that and I didn’t even charge for it. Thank me by buying all my books except “Love Carousel”.
Block B – Nilili Mambo
I always thought this song was pretty good, and time hasn’t hurt it at all. The only thing that might have aged poorly in retrospect is how Zico seems to get about 80% of the screentime here. Yes there were other Block B members but since they didn’t look at molka nobody cares about them apparently.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
