It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
TWICE – Dive
Certainly a “dive” in song quality, this song is only good for checking out how they’ve styled your favourite Twice girl, and I quite enjoyed Jeongyeon’s 2.5 seconds of screen time in this. Speaking of which, Twice sure have a lot of competition this year in the Objectification Survey so you’d better get voting at this link if you don’t want to see your faves pwned by some 19th generation flops.
Dreamcatcher – Justice
Someone over at Dreamcatcher HQ thinks we want slow songs where there’s only guitars in the chorus. Who’s going to tell them? Come on Asian Junkie and you other three Dreamcatcher superfans out there, stop sucking the agency’s dick and pull your fucking fingers out and tell them what they need to hear. Fuck whatever bullshit cause in k-pop you think is important, where’s the protest trucks for more blast beats and shredding in Dreamcatcher songs? Why aren’t Dreamcatcher fans mass-mailing toilet paper to the agency with “metal up your ass” written on it? Babymetal are megastars at this point and the fact that Dreamcatcher could be there too but aren’t, simply because they’re too scared to leave their distortion pedals on, is frankly an embarrassment. If they’re going to blue-ball us this hard, they might as well go back to Dal Shabet covers, at least we won’t get our hopes up.
NCT 127 – Walk
A fairly unsubtle advert for sneakers or whatever. When I was young people were getting robbed for their sneakers in my country for the first time and it was big news. Looks like NCT got stuck up and said “we don’t want to give up our sneakers, please, take our songwriter instead, it’s okay we’ll just do without one for a while”.
Weeekly – Lights on
I’m not too sure if this tepid nonsense is going to keep the lights on at Weeekly’s company for very much longer.
BADVILLAIN – Hurricane
And this is why I hate it when you people submit “short songs” or “special dance versions” or whatever for roundup. Inevitably if it’s any good the full thing comes out and then I end up reviewing it twice, which is stupid because there’s only limited room in these roundups. Just go to my other review if you actually give a fuck about what I had to say (unlikely).
NiziU – Rise Up
Niziu just sound kind of average here, which is pretty good by their standards, so I’ll calmly accept this as an “improvement” even though I’d never listen to it by choice.
Rockit Girl – We Want Each Other
Leeseul being pretty doesn’t really hide the lack of a song here and once again here’s a track which really should have brought the distortion. The over the top guitar solo is a lot of fun but apart from that there’s nothing to see here – come on guys, you’re not called Popfunkit Girl.
KISS OF LIFE – Te Quiero
OH COME ON. This just isn’t fair. Here I am getting crucified every week by the dumb little finger-wagging “I wanna be a far-right grifter when I grow up” TikTok toddlers: “look at how he doesn’t talk about the music, he always focuses on body image and says rude things and objectifies people tsk tsk wah wah wah” and then this comes out and it’s the blandest music ever with nothing that could possibly be said about it AND Natty just did Waterbomb. I feel like this is entrapment. I plead the fifth. By the way don’t forget to vote in the objectification survey just saying, your faves could use the help.
WOOAH – Shining on you
Kim Garam chalk art ahoy and I know you’re about to say “those are just love hearts and stuff” but what do you think a love heart actually represents? It’s shaped that way for a reason. Mind you I still think Garam is the chalk master. You can see one of her masterworks in TNTHGSWY6:ROTC which has been out for a couple weeks now and I just put up a walkthrough for those of you who got stuck, so enjoy finishing the game if you haven’t!
YOUHA – In the end we’re just
This generic pop is not much to write home about but it still has more guitar and more pace than what Dreamcatcher brought to the table this week. Sad times.
Lana – Circus
Lana’s back and her song isn’t that great this time around but the retro styling is definitely inspired.
Wheein – Coco Water
She’s got seven pens in a cup there and all she can draw is “coco water” on a piece of paper with a heart shape? Kim Garam would kick your ass.
Moonbyul feat. Hanhae – Nolto
And I’m going to keep talking about people’s appearances because why the fuck not, there’s sure precious little in the way of interesting music to write about this week. Moonbyul has the kind of look that only works on Moonbyul. If some other random k-pop boy or girl wore this outfit I’d be like “what the fuck are you doing in Moonbyul’s clothes”. Dare I say vote?
Fei – Toooo Busy
I’m toooo busy to review this so I skipped it. You can tell me what it’s like instead.
ENHYPEN – XO (Only If You Say Yes)
Oh wow, the killswitch effect on the lame Autotuned vocals. You just know that they’re going to mime that live like they’re really singing it.
FTISLAND – Serious
Dreamcatcher don’t get a pass this week for their boring power-ballad nonsense, so neither do FTIsland, fair’s fair.
Hi-Fi Un!corn – Phantom Pain
My pain when hearing another boring slow rock power ballad is very much real.
BIG OCEAN – Blow
Apparently the big thing about this group is that they’re deaf, which lens itself to all sorts of jokes from snarky Australian cunt k-pop writers like me, but the reality is that they’ve got a better song than most of the songwriters this week who can supposedly hear properly. Maybe there’s more deaf people in k-pop than we know…
BOY STORY – Pump !t Up
You know a JYP group is getting the big marketing push when JYP himself turns up to give them a hand. Maybe the reason why people don’t have a dream of being a rockstar anymore is that all the rock has been siphoned out of the rock songs. It’s not that they don’t want to rock, they’re just not allowed to.
BAE173, Fantasy Boys – To. My Dear X
This video is mainly in red. I’m colour-blind and I have great trouble seeing red, so I mainly just saw a bunch of disembodied hands and heads in this video, and every now and then a cosmetic product would float by for no reason, carried on a disembodied hand. If that’s your kink you could vote for these people if you wanted.
NTX – Problematic
I guess it was about time we had a kpop song called “problematic”. Watch these boys apologise at the first opportunity if they ever get big enough to be in a scandal of any note.
BEAUTYBOX – Come to me
I actually liked this somewhat, despite the truly awful brass synth pads clogging up everything. This could have really shined had a decent production team gotten hold of it.
Q6IX – Finder 2
Well their songs are still pooo but at least QSIX’s video editors are doing a slightly better job these days. This must be the week of nugu girl groups wearing ugly sportball clothes.
Youngjae – T.P.O
OKAY OKAY I’ll put Alphabet fucking Beaver in the goddamn non-Korean Asian thing if you insist, thanks all 682 of you who took the bait last week and complained bitterly when I said they would never get in. They’re pretty good actually and I chose a live video because they’re one of those bands where the studio recordings don’t really capture what is good about them, but they make a lot more sense in a live context (also see: King Brothers). You could listen to them if you wanted to.
B-OURS – Be Ur Girl
This song was submitted a while back and I was hanging onto it for one of those “Nugu Alert but with actual good songs in it” episodes, but it’s such a banger that it actually started getting some views and quickly escalated beyond eligibility criteria so now it appears here. It’s the best song this week by a mile (the “Roly Poly” chord progression certainly helps things along) so you’d better stan and stream and do all the parasocial things.
Isha – See
Isha was Gowoon from Berry Good. Word to the wise – do NOT get excited when your fave from some group you used to like does a solo song, because 95% of the time it’ll be some dreary rubbish that sounds like this. You may wish for your fave to escape the machine for their own physical and mental health, and that’s totally justified and understandable, but just remember that same machine is also what was feeding them the songs and image-creation that got you addicted to them in the first place. On the plus side, Isha is serving looks here and isn’t it interesting that when these girls escape their groups they most often opt for future projects with more skin exposure rather than less. It’s almost like k-pop is catered to conservative shitheads who can’t handle exposed female flesh because seeing skin pores interferes with their inner possessive creep tendencies, and the real feminists are the people who are comfortable enough to just let women portray themselves however they want, now imagine that.
Suvi – Suncream
This week’s ugly AI-generated shame file video is this song right here which actually isn’t that horrible and I’m sure if this girl gets popular k-pop fans will hand-wave this clunky ugly AI junk away like they do with anything their faves are involved in.
KyoungSeo – What’s Up
“Okay Dad, you can be in my band, just don’t embarrass me, okay? No! What are you doing, jumping around and waving your hair like a loon? This isn’t one of your dusty-ass prog rock bands! I can’t believe my friends at uni will see this…”
ASH ISLAND feat. Chanmina – OST
These two just got married, holy shit look you can be a k-pop and still be in a video together, how lovely and heartfelt, Hyuna PAVED THE WAY amirite
1999 WRITE THE FUTURE, LØREN – Gasoline
Where’s Rose the guitar-smasher when you need her.
YS Block – Question
I know that people whine about the short song trend, but when something like this appears I really am grateful.
Bad Boy Kitchen feat. Zelo & Johnjohn – Booty Clap
Not quite on Kerrigan May’s level, but still wholesome, and the ferns from Bunnings outdoor section being arranged in marijuana plantation style is a cute touch. I don’t think we’re going to end on a more wholesome, family friendly song so let’s just leave roundup here.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
RUMKICKS – Be A Punk Rocker
Do it, be a punk rocker! Rumkicks give you correct life advice by showing you how you should rock out in a punk style, while also correctly calling out some of the inverted snobbery that exists inside the punk scene globally. Legends.
BeBossTV – Top 4 viral idols at Waterbomb 2024
Are they right? What do you think? I love it how with Hwasa and Eunwoo they talk about their bodies freely but when it comes to Jeewon and Eunbi they’re out there with the weasel-words, because they can’t just say BOOBS, heaven forbid the fucking sky might fall if someone besides Kpopalypse is honest in 2024. If you’ve noted the hypocrisy as much as I have, you could make your vote count in the only voting that’s going to change anything this year, that’s right it’s the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey, good luck and may your faves win!
Girl’s Day – Darling
While nothing ever quite filled the hole left by Secret after they finished with their mid-period 50s/60s retro streak, Girl’s Day got closer than just about anybody else with “Darling”. They also dog-whistled to the hills, adding just enough cutesy aegyo into their bikini car-wash concept to get the ass-shaking and boob-bouncing over the line with conservative k-pop fans who were too distracted by AOA at the time to suspect a thing.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
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