It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Easily the best song from this group due to having a quick pace and a minimum of cringe rapping… okay well there’s still quite a lot of cringe rapping really, but the song is acceptable so I’ll cope.
Good production and a catchy main riff saves a song that ventures dangerously close to shit R&B segue territory at times. It actually reminds me a lot of Rain’s “Gang“, which is weirdly the only k-pop song ever to be criticised by k-pop fans for doing exactly what this NCT song and many others do.
Leaning into 80s synthpop doesn’t always give good results, because often the producers nail the sounds but forget to write a decent song. Whoever came up with this one got it right though, good job.
I nearly jumped out of the seat when the almost black-metal influenced intro happened, but the song quickly softens and gets boring as soon as the vocals start, what a shame as I was ready for ex-Loona girls’ problematic Satanism conversion.
More like a big miss from Girlset this week. It’s easy to see why Katseye got somewhere and Girlset have yet to.
Jessi definitely has the right attitude, but unfortunately the right attitude is all that this song has.
A more interesting song from Synsnake this week than last, due to having some more unusual contrasting sections. The generic screamo sections are still the band’s weakness because those non-melodic moments are given too much heavy lifting to do, but it’s still very good overall and Serah is a hugely underrated visual who will probably never get her due because she’s not in some sappy idol group.
Is it just me or is Apoki playuing down the “bunny” aspect of her image with each new video. Don’t tell me she “got prettier”.
Miyeon way out of her depth yet again, to make this type of nonsense song work you really need to have the right kind of delivery and Miyeon just hasn’t got it. Just stick to the bops and let Soyeon do the heavy lifting.
My readers warned me about this one and by god they were right, what a wall of cacophonous ass. Bang bang someone shoot it dead.
Actually not terrible but this would have been a lot better with about 50% of the vocals in it. Someone let these poor girls take a breath!
“We’re breaking the mold in k-pop” really just means “instead of us boys doing generic boy group concepts that are trendy now, we’re going to do generic girl group concepts that are trendy now”.
I guess they mean their dying breath. What a shitty way to go out, with a lazy montage “please remember us” video, fuck this lame fucking shit. Do what Gfriend did and go out with a banger, not some limp lighter-waving crud for the concert you’ll never have.
Closing your ears would be wiser.
A fantastic start but too much Autotune on the vocals squeezes the life out of everything.
“Idntt” give a shit about this either, so let’s have our weekly non-Korean LGBT feature here instead, yay! This week it’s Uboa, a transgender artist from Melbourne, and her music is… really something. Just listen to it. That is all.
Back to k-pop and the usual mid-paced moody boy group thing sounds pretty quaint after listening to Uboa doesn’t it.
Many years ago I dated an architecture student and we went to one of her university graduate exhibit things together where we saw the results of the students’ latest assignment which was to design a house for Peter Garrett (the singer of Australian rock group Midnight Oil, although he’s more known for his political career and unhinged dancing). All of the monstrosities that the students came up with looked something like the weird, messy building that these boys are dancing in front of, shit you definitely didn’t want to live in or be seen anywhere near, not a functional-looking normal house anywhere. I guess it works for a k-pop music video though because it looks like a structure an idol group would be locked inside and tortured in for seven years.
Ah, it’s blues, kill it with fire. How come k-pop tie-ins with children’s TV have to always be lame blues crap. The kids need to know more than three chords!
Little did SM Entertainment know what they were doing when they threw EXO in the basement for “Growl” now we can’t get any of the boys out of there for the forseeable future. Have xikers ever actually seen the sun, does anyone know?
From the person who sent me this: “this song was made in 2011 and was supposed to be the debut of 2 (two) of their company’s ggs and one “AI group” where the songs aside from this one was sung by a soloist uncredited”. It kind of shows because the song has a simplicity that definitely was more trendy at that time. It’s refreshing but also wears off quickly because nothing much really happens.
This song is as boring as those electric-acoustic guitars in the video. I guess the endorsement from Fender didn’t come through because they’re using the proprietary Fender headstock shape but without the Fender logo. They’d better watch out of they might cop a lawsuit, Fender are more litigation-happy than Min Hee Jin about their headstock design.
Autotune is such a great character-stripper out of anyone’s vocal that these two sound almost exactly the same.
We really are in virtualgroupception when virtual avatar groups have a virtual avatar version of themselves in their own virtual avatar videos. not that anyone gives a shit but now that Asian Junkie is dead (RIP) someone has to notice Plave until he rolls back the rock.
I hope this girl doesn’t get big with her crappy ballad because it just means I’ll have to type more punctuation in roundups in future.
Truly awful. Traditional instruments don’t help make this sound like anything other than traditionally shit.
Did I already review this last week or am I just that bored by this shit that Katie’s songs are already blending into each other even though she’s only released about two songs this decade. We’re really at the ass end of the year, aren’t we.
The Deep throws back to late 2000s k-pop style and it’s decent. Feel free to say something bad about it just to annoy her fans though, they seem to really like that sort of thing judging by how much they encourage me.
Well someone has to wake Dynamic Duo the fuck up I guess. This is really good and the type of song Dynamic Duo are rarely involved with these days.
You know that the week after any Rockit Girl song comes out, there’ll be an “acoustic version” made that’s pretty much musically the same just so they can shoot Leeseul from more angles. Which is the right idea to be honest. I like this video because confirmed Kpopalypse reader Leeseul has clearly read the black and white stripes post and is rocking them very correctly, but she didn’t wear that top much in the first video so it’s good that we get to see it a bit more here.
Ejae talks some trufax about the industry and her time being an SM trainee. It’s nothign you don’t know… but then maybe for some it is. It’s easy to fall into the Redditor trap of “oh everyone knows this stuff” but the reality is that there’s new people coming into k-pop all the time and they need to be told what’s up.
Of course it’s all edited and fixed in post so shows like this are never an indication of how good or bad they really are (unless you’re lucky enough to find leaked pre-edited mixes) but the production values of these shows are still good and everyone looks great and it’s k-pop which is all about looks anyway so let’s just roll with it and look at the attractive feminist people.
What made GD&TOP work quite well (on occasion) is that as soon as you got sick of one person’s vocal, the other vocal kicked in and it was a refreshing change. Without that contrast T.O.P on his own just sounds bland. Trying to impress us with fast rap can’t compensate for the slow beat and the general monotonous of it all, T.O.P might’ve had idol charisma to burn back in the day but Gwangil Jo he ain’t.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
