It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Big on beats, but small on melody and catchiness. This is the sort of song that would probably work great in a live context when everyone is hyped and the subwoofers can do their work so it’ll probably be a highlight of their live shows, but if you actually just sit there and properly listen to the music for more than 30 seconds it becomes increasingly hard to give a shit. Cool sounds alone can’t make a cool song.
Trust me Tiffany, we’re already calm enough. She definitely missed the memo that fast tempos are “in”, so props to her for bucking the trend, but that doesn’t mean that we want this funeral march pace either. Valium is Tiffany’s best friend, is valium your best friend?
Hilarious to see the discourse about this song at the moment and everyone upset that it’s plagiarising aespa’s (superior) “Whiplash” when apparently both songs have exactly the same songwriter and producer. Having said that, the vocal meter reminds me more of early 2NE1 and if the fashions and video direction didn’t recall the “Whiplash” video I doubt anyone would have even made the connection. People listen with their eyes, after all.
H1-key are on such a roll lately that they can even make this 2000s-era-style nonsense sound actually quite good.
Someone sent me a massive fucking essay a while back about how all these groups are going for some weird Italian cinema vibe aesthetic visual blah blah and this is actually a perfect example of that. Also it sucks. I can’t remember if this style is salsa, samba, rumba or what, I’m calling it “shitba” until further notice.
I’m not sure what I expected from the new XG post-executives drug-something-something but this sure wasn’t it. It’s not amazing but it works well enough musically, mind you the most impressive thing here is how they pull the styling off. Everyone somehow making hair and clothes that just shouldn’t work, work.
You can usually count on NCT127 to do “high risk high reward”, they are either cool or absolute shit, very little in between. So I was surprised to find myself having no real strong opinion of this one, although I think it maybe leans a bit towards the good side just due to that chorus which is so catchy that it stays in my head and… oh wait I just forgot how it went. Never mind.
I really like what’s going on in the harmony here. It really softens the blow that really not much else is going on at all.
The video set is a live cooking show, they took a leaf out of NewJeans’ book and they’re here with the alibi all prepared in advance! This isn’t JYP’s first rodeo, they know what they’re doing. What a pity that the song is just some blues-based nonsense, maybe a little less squeezing one out and a little more songwriting in the studio could have helped this.
Odd Youth hit the right notes with a song that recalls the better second-gen k-pop. Apparently closet-metalheads Sweetune were responsible for this one and it shows, with the big drum sound, big melody and those guitars sneaking in when you least expect. The redemption arc for these girls has arrived.
….and, that redemption arc didn’t last long, did it. Oh well, back to the drawing board!
Soyeon also leaning heavily into the 2NE1 sound on this new track. I don’t mind it, those were good times.
A remake of some mid 90s k-pop song that sounds like every 90s k-pop song because they all used exactly the same chord progression with minor variations back then for some reason. Anyway aside from a bit of modern production sparkle this is so faithful to the original that they might as well not have bothered.
Just your semi-regular reminder that Cosmosy are completely uninteresting in any way and I don’t write more about them for a reason. Not even the admittedly cool satanic witchy vibes can make me give a fuck.
Today I learned that Korea also does that stupid thing with the bus seats where they make the ones up the very back slightly higher in a futile attempt to stop misbehaviour, as if the bus driver is actually going to say or do shit if you start scribbling graffiti on the seats or squeezing your squeezy bottle.
Summer songs are pretty drab and The Deep’s is no exception but I just appreciate her going hard Waterbomb style. Of course she’s not actually in Waterbomb but I feel like if we stan her enough or at least vote for her in the Kpopalypse Objectification survey to respectfully appreciate the lengths she’s gone to in outperforming your bias, we can get someone to pay her big bucks to get her there, so let’s work on it, people.
Not much of a song but it does have Stray Kids members by the pool, which is a good reminder that the latest Kpopalypse Objectification survey is now live and accepting votes! Don’t forget to vote – do it for [insert your bias here]!
Not the best Effie song I’ve ever heard but I still think JBL should give her a call as she suggests at 2:19.
Raina is both looking and sounding like some rando who just got kicked out of a 4th gen girl group here and got the AI face filters applied so you wouldn’t notice her crying. Check out my review of Orange Caramel’s Korean album in order to regain any faith lost in Raina.
Because we’ve got Raina here as well, I was all ready to do a “KPOPALYPSE BIASES SLUMMING IT IN BALLAD HELL SECTION” but this isn’t even the fucking real Suhyun but some impostor singing some j-crap. Eww, get it away.
Is Korea really going to make the word “dire” a thing because if so I think it’s time we all checked out of k-pop for good. Also, this song is balls, imagine spending all that time and effort making some kind of “dark mood” and then just chucking major scale melodies over it all. It’s true what I wrote in my “Lipstick” review, the people behind the scenes working on all the different parts of the total package really don’t talk to each other much at all.
Well, this is spectacular, in that I mean it’s spectacularly bad. Every five seconds a new bad thing happens musically and they keep up that pace for the entire song, like one of those freeway car crash videos where 50 cars are all piled up and somehow you can’t imagine how it can keep possibly going on like this but another dozen cars all manage to crash into the existing easily-visible pile of twisted metal one by one anyway. Genuinely impressive.
We got “Squeezy” and “Saucin'” in one week over at JYP. Someone’s been busy letting the creative inspiration “flow” over there, gosh. Anyway I like the happy hard bass drum here and how the chords are basically just “Wild Thing“, but that’s about all there is to like here.
This other song has a cool beat but it just feels like they chucked just any old randomness over it and called it a day.
Wait… is this… heavy? And awesome? Like a k-pop “Canon Rock” complete with guitar solos? How did these losers get so good? Why did it take them nearly 20 years? What the fuck have these people been doing with themselves all this time? Sad though how this group’s massive ultra-huge egos take centre-stage and they completely refuse to give the actual guitarist doing all that work any screen time at all, we don’t even know who it is. Brilliant and pathetic, all at once.
I’m sorry but other k-rock just sounds lame now.
Yeah, this is weak.
How fast do you reckon SM Entertainment would absorb this group back into SM branding if they actually had a hit? Well don’t worry, this song probably isn’t going to be it, even though it sounds very similar and probably slightly better than the garbage SM were churning out in the early-2000s.
So you guessed right, this is a “k-pop group” that’s actually students from the Berklee School of Music in the US. The funniest thing about this is that Berklee’s reputation as a once-reputable school of music is now in the absolute shitter thanks to the school’s wholesale adoption of AI-slop-machine Suno as part of the school curriculum, simply because the administration of the school is getting kickbacks from shady tech interests. The branding is cute but these girls might be wiser to change their name and cut all ties with the School of Slop as soon as possible.
I appreciate the retro hip-hop style but something about this isn’t hitting. I think it’s the predominance of vocals and the shunting of the rhythm to almost in the background. It’s just too polite-sounding. Not enough bish and bash in the bosh.
Well, I guess it’s better than Little PSY when he debuted. The bar is truly on the floor though.
Bossanova in 2026 is a nope. IU outsold.
I don’t hate this but I really feel like getting a male to sing that chorus right at the balls-tightening end of his vocal range was a mistake. It just sounds uncomfortable.
Two of Korea’s greatest living rap legends to get together for a collab and… wait, is this them? Really? Seriously what the fuck happened here, this is awful. No, honestly, these two both can do better than this. Did they really make this song of their own free will? Sad times we live in.
Fucking god-bothering wank. There’s no direct Christian references here but there doesn’t need to be, I know lame-ass dogwhistle church music when I hear it.
If you listen to Korean rock and wonder if anyone’s doing anything all that interesting or unique, there’s Silica Gel, who are honestly consistently good and the only reason I don’t feature them a bit more here is because… well I’m basically lame and you probably shouldn’t pay too much attention to what I do, to be perfectly honest. Korean Indie will tell you all about how good this is, go support him, unlike me he doesn’t write about lame pop crap because he made sensible life choices.
KAVE are also good. There are good rock bands in Korea. Your bias probably isn’t in one of them. Just saying.
Imagine being Sohyang. This is what you’re good at. This is what you have to do each day. I bet she looks in the mirror sometimes and wished she stayed in that retail job.
Choi Sam got on my best list nearly a decade ago and this is your reminder that she’s still around and still great and unlike so many Korean rappers she actually knows what a good beat is. Pity about the AI slop video but I’ll cut the indies some slack for that, although honestly her in a room with a microphone rapping would have been visually superior to this no matter what it looked like and she really should dump the ugly slop machine asap.
Gains points for rock and a good song in general, loses them for pointing the Shure Super 55 at her guitar instead of her mouth. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Luci Gang is back and has another decently good rap song. Hyoi is also good here, and wow good rap music, it’s a thing. Let’s stop roundup here before it gets worse again. We know this can’t last.
Here’s this week’s non-Korean feature. Caramel Candid (sorry I’m not doing that capitalisation again it’s too much work) are great and they’ve never been better than right now. They might look like the usual j-rock thing but instead of sounding like Band-Maid’s fairly standard girl-rock, Passcode’s gimmicky crap or Scandal’s conservative dreariness, they sound like a Japanese Sonic Youth, the good, early, pissed-off version of Sonic Youth, but also tighter, more disciplined, less sloppy. Also outstanding lyrics and themes in general, look into it. Recommended.
This video is seven years old, and over nine minutes long. And T-ara don’t even rate a mention! Pathetic, no research by this guy. Also calling Native Americans “Indians” what is that, tsk tsk. So racist omg. I bet if he met me in person he’d be saying racist things straight away like “throw another shrimp on the barbie” and “nauurrr” and mocking my culture… YouTubers these days, so problematic… but hey at least he put Julie in this video, she’s great, so props for that. Look at that smile at the end, adorable. I wish my neighbours were as nice as Julie but they’re awful loud cashed-up bogans who play tennis on their lame backyard tennis court and have stupid parties every weekend. Fuck my neighbours. Just saying.
Take away the Christian stuff and the slut-shaming and MissWeiWei is actually excellent. I stan, honestly. This video is full of solidly good observations and maybe a few less good observations too but seriously it’s pretty on point and hey we can’t agree on everything. Nobody is going to save you but you. It’s true. Where can I send her Girls909 I seriously want her to read it, a Christian k-pop fan’s objective opinion on that book would interest me a lot.
Don’t die of shock, but Crayon Pop’s “Bar Bar Bar” never got a review anywhere on kpopalypse.com back in its heyday, I only ever really talked about it in relation to their other songs that were either better or worse than it… but usually better, as Crayon Pop had some serious bangers in the 2010s and “Bar Bar Bar” actually wasn’t one of them. It was by no means a bad song but it was just a bit too basic to really stick with me, almost every other song in Crayon Pop’s catalog at the time was better than it, and I was a bit mystified at the time how out of all their songs this was the one that really blew up. It was at that point I realised that it’s just as well that I never tried to be a k-pop producer because I clearly don’t have the same tastes as the general population and I would probably just end up making some total bullshit-pop that only me and three other people liked and that wouldn’t sell, or even if it did sell, everyone else would be hating it like they hate Twice’s “Signal” (a great song).
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week! In the meantime don’t forget that the latest Kpopalypse Objectification survey is now live and accepting votes! Don’t forget to vote – do it for [insert your bias here]! Stay safe, caonimas!
