It’s nearly the end of the year, and the best and worst songs of 2025 will be released soon! In the meantime, welcome to the “honourable and dishonourable mentions” post – all the songs that weren’t quite good or bad enough to get into the Kpopalypse end of year lists for 2025!
The following are all songs that were very good, but not quite good enough to get into my 30 favourites list for 2025. There is also, below this, an equal amount of “dishonourable mentions”, songs that were really quite bad, yet not bad enough to hit my worst 30 songs of the year. Please note:
Songs are sorted alphabetically by artist, not by order of preference
This list is feature tracks only, either with an MV, or that were promoted on music shows or released as a single
OST songs (except where noted), songs for sporting events, obvious lazy AI bullshit created from just a single prompt and Christmas songs are not eligible
This list is pure personal preference only, it does not factor in chart success, popularity, cultural relevance etc
Your opinions may (and probably will) differ, and that’s okay – my opinion is not important
If this post makes you mad, it’s working as intended, don’t forget to write about it somewhere so we can all pretend to care
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
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015B feat. KYLY – Keep Dreamin’
A great song that only suffers from not having crazy Eddie Van Halen style distorted guitar solos, it’s a small detail that makes a big difference in this style. There’s probably about 50,000 guitarists in Korea who could have done the job if 015B weren’t capable themselves. As it is the song is great anyway, hitting all the right 80’s pop metal notes, but it hurts thinking about how much better this could have been with some more shredding attitude.
Chanyeol – Ocean Drive
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE guy from EXO releases a good solo song! I’d love to know what SM’s excuse is for fucking up 99% of their other male solos.
The Deep – Girls Like Me
The Deep delivers a serious electro-banger, proving that a melody-less chorus can actually work pretty well if you’ve got some rhythmic kick in the backing track. The gym video is super cool too, and makes me wish my gym had music like this instead of the poop they usually play on their stupid CrowdDJ thing.
Gongwon – Escape
Damn decent shoegaze rock that doesn’t fall into the dreariness that usually plagues this style, there’s enough pace and distortion here to offset the more dreamy textures and make the whole thing work.
Kim Jaejoong – Rhapsody
Punchy rock action that shows Jaejoong could easily front his own X Japan style group if he wanted. SM Entertainment take notes, this is the kind of quality we expect of your veteran boy solo comebacks. You’re not going to let yourselves be shown how to do your fucking job by these slave-contract-denying upstarts, are you?
Kiiikiii – Dancing Alone
Kiiikiii fans annoyed that I think the rest of their catalog is a fountain of unmitigated trash can at least take heart in the fact that “Dancing Alone” is a solidly good pop song and the kind of thing that they should and could be doing more of. Cracking pace, punchy synth work and catchy melody is all it takes, someone grab the writers of all their other stuff and staple their ears to the speakers while we put this on repeat.
Moon Myang – Brrrm
It’s been a very rock 2025. A lot of fast-paced guitar-based stuff like this came out this year, and Moon Myang… wait, who the hell is Moon Myang? No idea, but Kpopalypse is not biased, I’ll take a good song from wherever I can get it.
NiziU – What If
Niziu discover rock music and the results are way better than anyone could have expected. Notably it doesn’t have that cheesy balls-cut-off sound that ruins a lot of “k-pop turning Japanese for the yen”. Now I have to stop my groaning whenever they appear in my roundup shortlists now that I know their production team is capable of not sucking.
NMIXX – Blue Valentine
“Oh there they go with that stupid change-up shit again” but wait, this is actually good. Really really good and definitely a grower, I like it a lot more now than when I first heard it. I don’t know what happened in the NMIXX camp over the last year and a bit but they’ve definitely started getting things right, this song is just straight up impressive. It hits all the right notes and actually does something decent with its “change up” by using it to increase the dynamics rather than pull a random switcheroo on us for no reason. Excellent work.
PRIMROSE – Cinema
Primrose had a weak start to their careers and I’m sure they’re still pretty deep in nugu territory but damn did their songwriting just get a shot in the arm with “Cinema”. Groups that barely have an audience are simply not supposed to have songs this good, if this kind of quality from less-favoured groups keeps up people might actually start reading Kpopalypse Nugu Alert for the music… or for any other reason.
Seo Eve – They never know
Seo Eve simply refuses to have a bad song and while “They Never Know” isn’t her best by a long shot it’s still pretty good, sharing a lot of the same characteristics of much of this year’s better material – catchy melody, FAST pace and revved up rock-lite backings that keep it well ahead of much of this year’s competition.
Seulgi – Baby, Not Baby
Seulgi taps into her inner Britney Spears and I’m not sure if it really works for her as a brand concept or whatever but I honestly couldn’t give a fuck about that. The results are actually pretty good just on a musical level and a fair bit better than the Britney Spears originals, because they’ve also thrown a bit of early Le Sserafim style heavy bass in there to beef it up.
Sorn – Heartstorm
Sorn really needs to get a fucking clue about music. She pumps out endless TikToks upon TikToks for her extremely mid feature tracks, but whenever she has an absolute banger like “Sharp Objects” she pretty much ignores it every time. It’s the same with “Heartstorm”, this song wasn’t even planned for a video at all but Sorn did one anyway just to shut her fans up who kept begging for some visual accompaniment to this great song, and she doesn’t even put her name in the video description, that’s how little faith she has in this thing. Damn girl stop trying to go viral on social media every three seconds and get a creative music consultant or something so you don’t sleep on the next gem you drop.
Suzy – Come Back
The best ballad singers in k-pop are the ones who can’t sing. Suzy works on this track for the same reason that Girls’ Generation’s Yoona was also such a good balladeer – their vocals are subtle and understated because that’s all that they have the ability to do. No show-off wank ruining the song, no dumb-ass warbling improvised vocal runs, just a voice that doesn’t sound like a rusty gate, sticking to the melody for fucking once, pushing out the emotion in their voice because they’ve got no vocal skill to lean on so emotion is all they have in their trick bag. Genuinely beautiful.
Tomatomat – Collect Call Garage
No, I don’t know who these girls are either, but their song sure is great. Pacy early T-ara retro vibes but also with a modern touch, a very rare example of just a hint of NewJeansification actually benefitting a song instead of crippling it beyond repair. It’s about time someone did something good with this aesthetic.
TWICE – Like 1
Twice have sounded like such bullshit lately that I practically wrote them off completely but hold your horses because here comes Twice Japan content which actually takes a few chances every now and again unlike their play-it-safe Korean production stable. “Like 1” is a ripsnorter of a song, a poppy j-rocker with something poppy j-rockers don’t usually have, actual guitar riffs. It’s substantially more rocking than a lot of so-called rock-branded k-pop groups.
BONUS SONGS
Thanks… I guess?
BLACKPINK – Jump
I’m torn about Blackpink’s “Jump”. On the one hand, the backing track is as generic as they come (straight out of my local gym’s hideous auto DJ machine), the AI video is such pure ugly slop that Blackpink fans actually noticed how dogshit it looked and had the guts to loudly complain instead of saying “it’s just good CGI pinky swear”, and the music bears absolutely none of the signature sound that we’ve become accustomed to from Blackpink. On the other hand, damn this shit fucking rocks anyway. As a little bonus, if even Blackpink themselves are moving away from the slow “in your area” jams, that means that gradually so will everyone else because k-pop is nothing but a bunch of herd-following sheep just doing what the most popular group does, and right now that most popular group is Blackpink so there’s no way this can’t have an influence. The rippingly fast pace and ear-bashing rave techno rhythm is definitely welcome so let’s see some nugus clone THIS Blackpink era to try to claw their way to relevance, I welcome it.
A 100% certified SLAPPER
Super Junior – Express Mode
After about 67 member swaps and over a decade of exploring music which just never suited them, Super Junior is finally back to doing bangers. Their best song will probably always be “Sorry Sorry” but “Express Mode” definitely harks back to that golden age when Super Junior were serving up some of k-pop’s most iconic dancefloor tracks.
OST of the year
Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami – Golden
Basically a bargain bin version of IVE’s “I Am” partially ruined with too much overcooked vocal, but let’s be real, “I Am” is so great that even this screechy knock-off sounds pretty damn fine and better than 99% of this year’s pop music as well as 100% of this year’s OSTs. No wonder this thing blew up internationally along with the movie, and it shows how big IVE themselves could get with a bit of Netflix backing too, not like that’s going to happen but we can dream. The vocals for “Golden” were never meant to be performed live, they were purely a studio creation designed with the imagined range of squeaky fictional cartoon movie characters in mind, and that’s why nobody (excepy Lily) can actually sing this without pitch-correction including the performers themselves, plus why the song grates on repeated listens. Nevertheless it’s got enough melodic hook power to work both in and out of the context of the movie, and also it’s probably hilarious to watch people try to do this song at karaoke.
DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS
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BABYMONSTER – Billionaire
BabyMonster are definitely not tearing up the charts the way YG’s previous girl group Blackpink were, and it’s easy to see why. There’s nothing unifying any of BabyMonster’s material other than the group themselves merely existing, it’s all “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” stuff. So far, everything’s slid down to the floor leaving a giant brown stain in its wake, and “Billionaire” is definitely ironically cheap-sounding, the kind of pseudo-Latin crap that C/D tier girl groups usually get lumbered with, not the new team from a supposed “big” agency. I don’t know who the billionaire of the song title is but it’s definitely not going to be anyone involved with this group, the way things are going.
Cosmosy – High=Love
I’ve been ignoring Cosmosy submissions for roundup all year on purpose, partly because they kind of stretch the definition of what k-pop is a little too far (I’d consider them even less k-pop-adjacent than XG, for instance) but really I’m just making excuses and the real reason is that because their music is all consistently just total bullshit anyway and I couldn’t be fucked covering yet another fail group. However I had to make an exception and include the yelpy, screechy, tuneless garbage that is “High=Love” because it’s my duty to document rubbish like this and if we don’t kick these groups they won’t learn.
Haseul – Love Poison
To get this kind of empty dull nonsense over the line, you need at least one of two things – incredible production smarts, or a singer who can make the most of what little there is. Have both, and you’ve got something like Portishead. Have neither, and you have something like “Love Poison”. Haseul is sadly not that singer, limping along like a wet cabbage over an equally inept backing track that sounds like every instrument was covered in layers of carpet before it was recorded. Haseul is suited to something, but it’s not this. Just a sad waste of every Loona fan’s time.
Hyuna – Mrs. Nail
There was a time, not so long ago, when Hyuna was on top of the cultural tree in the k-pop world. Those days seem pretty distant at the moment, with Hyuna being cancelled for everything from her breakfast cereal choice to the type of lighting she uses in Instagram posts, but I never got into the Hyuna hate, the only problem that I have with Hyuna is her song choice. At some point about a decade ago, a switch just seemingly flipped in her head and she thought “right, I’m going to start making bullshit music that sucks now and see how that works out”. I’m not one to be controlling or deny someone their life choices but I do wonder what life would be like if Hyuna didn’t keep coming up with songs are dreary as “Mrs Nail”. A pastiche of lame blues riffs, screechy vocals and a lame chromatic chorus, this song truly is nails across a chalkboard-tier quality, so at least the song title is appropriate.
I:MOND – Wonderland
This would have been a pretty good song actually, had someone remembered to play the synthesisers in the same key as the rest of the music. Of course I exaggerate, but there’s some real wrong note sorry I mean “jazz chord” action happening here and combined with the psychoacoustic effect of the lower end of that sine-wavey keyboard seeming somewhat out of tune, the result is a real chaotic mess.
IU feat. Balming Tiger – A Beautiful Person
“IU and Balming Tiger… how’s a combination like that even going to work?” you may well ask yourself. Probably more people involved should have also asked this question, because I don’t think anyone came up with the answer.
Jisoo – Your Love
Blackpink’s Jisoo takes one for the environment, which is a noble cause even if the song itself is lagging behind. It turns out that she’s a lot better when she’s destroying it with an “Earthquake“, a genuinely good track that narrowly missed the honourable list this year. Please let me know when the trees are all saved so we can get back to Jisoo making proper music.
Miyeon & Jike Junyi – Glow Up
I don’t know anything about Jike Junyi because I’m not Cpopalypse, but I do a lot about Miyeon, and… well actually no I don’t, other than she’s in i-dle and she’s one of those people that I boringly get sent “good look for her?” questions about on my livestreams as if I even give a fuck what this woman wears. Anyway it’s just another collab except this one’s even more awful than most of them because these two can’t stop singing in each other’s way.
Raina – Sleepless Night
Do you remember the good times that Orange Caramel brought us in the early 2010s? It turns out that Raina herself certainly didn’t, which is kind of strange given how she was actually in Orange Caramel. Maybe she’s just trying to forget now because she was in Pledis so you know she was most likely treated like garbage and I get that it probably wasn’t as good times for her as it was for us, but I do hope she manages to work through her trauma and allows herself to rediscover non-shit music at some point.
RIIZE – Fly Up
If toxic positivity were a song.
Solar – Want
Brassy nonsense that I definitely do not want. I’m not sure that anyone wants this. I’m not even sure that Solar wanted to be here given that at 1:44 she’s trying to pack herself into a box and ship herself away like Ichika Matsumoto in that film of hers where she spends the entire thing being transported around in a backpack, except that Ichika actually has better songs than this. When you’re a supposed “singer” and you can’t even make a song that sounds as good as a couple of bored pornstars’ novelty rap track, you’ve got problems.
Song Sohee – Hamba Kahle
K-pop fans pull their dicks and clits constantly over “cultural appropriation” nontroversies because someone wears basketball attire wrongly or something (as if anything to do with icky sportball could even be considered “culture” by a normal person), but when Paul Simon-tier poorsploitation soundalikes come out the kiddies who claim to care so much are silent. To be fair though, probably only about three people actually listened to this trash.
Taehyun – Bird of Night
Someone made the weird decision here to double the vocals with the sub-bass and that doesn’t really work, but then neither does anything else about this silliness.
Taeyong – H.E.R
Taeyong has this incredibly annoying quality to his voice on this track like he shoved an electric toothbrush right into his sinuses, and I’m not going to try and speculate on why that is, but I do know that it sucks. At least the video’s pretty, with Taeyong finding a nice virtual girlfriend to date because she’s the only person who will sit and listen to him talk about his latest cryptocurrency ventures after he scammed all his real girlfriends on eBay.
XG – In The Rain
XG songwriters really need to put this slow R&B thing to bed, it just doesn’t fit the group at all. XG have been killing it with upbeat songs lately but as soon as they slow things down to “lover’s tempo” everything quickly turns south.
Zzone – Devil’s Jam
Jeewon was doing pretty well in Cignature, being the group’s ahem “visual” ahem and also annoying a lot of people by actually being very pro-objectification (something that k-pop fans have tried to twist the other way with “evil edits” that suggest she wasn’t into it but as always unedited footage tells a different story). Then Cignature folded and Jeewon rebranded herself as “Zzone” for god knows what reason, probably losing a large chunk of her own fans in the process who simply lost track of her and wondered where the fuck she went. Anyway here she is just in case you were wondering and this song really doesn’t suit her musically or visually, being some weird tropical house thing from ten years ago but they actually forgot to put the toot-toots in, I guess they got distracted by something but oh well, song sucks with or without them.
BONUS SONGS
Video of the year
VVS – Tea
This high-flying, stylish action-tastic video should have Americans happily nerding out about how the recoil is too low on their favourite fetish toy, sort of the equivalent of what I do with microphones. For everyone else there’s still the great song… oh wait, no there isn’t, this song is fucking shit actually, oh well. Hey it still looks nice, credit where it’s due.
Video of the year that also mrcs
Seo Eve – Nyang
Now imagine the same thing as the VVS video above, but this time without the guns but with a much better song instead, and cats.
CAONIMA OF THE YEAR
HEENA – Statement Of Facts
Okay, now I know why Heena moved from Korea to the USA, it’s because American defamation laws are stronger and she wanted to spill the tea… and boy, does she spill. For those not in the loop, in Korea you can say something true about someone else and still lose a defamation case in court if it causes “reputational loss”, but in most other countries around the world, truth is a total defence against defamation, and Heena is aware of that because she mentions it here in the opening slide. On “Statement Of Facts” she rips various people a new one much in the same way that she did on last year’s “Watermelon Tits” with tons of receipts and context to make sure we don’t misunderstand anything, it reminds me of Zheani’s “The Question” in its efforts to leave no stone unturned. This track seems like it’s in response to some dis raps that other rappers might have recorded in response to “Watermelon Tits” (where Henna calls out about a dozen mostly male rappers for all sorts of things ranging from being creepy and weird to various sex and drugs offences), but I can’t find any of those response raps, but I doubt I was missing much as I don’t think anything is going to top Heena here. Rappers fighting always makes the best rap music, because there isn’t enough anger energy in rap these days with everyone trying to be soft and weak for the R&B crossover bucks, but Heena doesn’t give a fuck about any of that, literally screaming “I don’t give a fuck about hip-hop” as she smashes her plastic watermelons around… it’s just great. I hope she’s doing well.
Please now enjoy this video of the Honourable mentions!
That’s all for this post! Kpopalypse will return soon with his favourite songs of 2025 and the worst songs of 2025, too! Expect them fondly!