It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
ENHYPEN – Brought The Heat Back
Not much heat to be had here, although I did like the heat-vision footage which I tend to associate with watching innocent people get shot by helicopters thanks to seeing all that Iraq war footage Julian Assange kept leaking out years ago. Now he’s finally out of jail he can sue Enhypen for plagiarism.
Stray Kids – Mountains
I guess the title is referring to the mountains of generic boy-group pop which I have to endure each week, this unexciting nonsense is definitely adding to the pile. Since I have nothing to say about it, this is your reminder that this is your last week to vote in the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey which you can do by clicking HERE! Better get moving and vote for Stray Kids or whoever else you want to before it’s too late!
Stray Kids – Stray Kids
I actually kind of dig Stray Kids’ cringe self-titled song though, it has pace, which makes it fast enough to be catchy and fun. If this song was just 10BPM slower it would be the most boring and cheesy millenial-whoopfest ever, but because it doesn’t waste time, it works.
Jeon Somi – Ice Cream
Somi takes a stab at something somewhere between Hyuna and Orange Caramel and it really doesn’t work that well because of the near-total lack of harmony. Just one chord change somewhere in the chorus would have been enough to get it over the line (unless it’s I to IV, in which case just shoot the songwriter).
NMIXX – Feifei
NMIXX do the ballad thing and it sounds like everyone else who does the ballad thing.
BLACKSWAN – Roll Up
Goddamn Blackswan are absolutely killing the visuals here, leaving everyone else dead in a ditch this week, and I don’t even like cowboy concepts yet they make it work. If you haven’t voted for any of the members in the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey yet this video might make you regret it, so if you haven’t I’d get right onto that if I were you and show your appreciation for the extreme amounts of effort that everyone went to here. Pity the music is just the usual slow-chorus “in your area” thing and not much to write home about.
Lil Cherry – Crying In Da Club
Lil Cherry is a perfect example of an artist who should never touch Autotune, ever, except to move the program into the recycle bin on her computer. She has a cool, unique type of vocal delivery with just her raw voice which is what makes all her better tracks work so well, and switching on that accursed machine just kills all her musical appeal stone dead.
UZA, Bikini Cactus – Headshot
UZA’s latest didn’t really grab me melodically but at least has appealing muscular rhythms which we could use a little more of in k-pop these days with so many acts pitching in with the light airy-fairy beats that are trending right now thanks to you-know-who. Pity about also having the most severely vertically-letterboxed video I’ve ever seen, but at least she’s not using AI this time.
90TAN – Tang Tang Tang
Nothing much going on here musically, although I’m glad they at least had fun shooting the video.
TRENDZ – Rebirth
I like the return of guitar to idol pop in general that’s happened over the last year, but it’s always a bit too light and fluffy. Turn the guitars up! I don’t care of it drowns out the vocal, who gives a fuck, you mostly can’t sing anyway.
LAYSHA – Domino
Veteran adult-oriented k-pop group Laysha are going for a late run on the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey so you’d better get your votes in and support the only group in k-pop who is as misandrist as Halcyon. Speaking of which, since the fourth and last book in the Shin Hana series is out later this month, I’ve now edited the first three to reflect that the series is now complete (so they don’t say the next book is ‘coming soon’) plus tidied up a couple minor text things. So if you bought the e-books you can download them again if you want the new versions, and if you bought the paperbacks you can congratulate yourself on owning a rare “first edition” before Kpopalypse became a million-selling author and snatched J.K.whatshername’s wig!
MNZ – Chi
According to my song submitter (who is always good with helpful context) this is “a duo composed by OH MY GIRL Mimi and a comedian”. I’m grateful for the info as I wouldn’t have guessed it, there’s nothing very funny or very Oh-My-Girlish (any incarnation) about any of this.
L – What’s Not To Love
A lot.
Nayoon – No Tomorrow
Yes it’s Kim Nayoon once-Kpopalypse interviewee (until “external forces” got in the way) back with a new song! It’s a bit millennial gym-techno for my taste but whoever had the idea of putting Nayoon on the motorbike is a genius.
WAKER – To.X
If you’re going to write a crappy ballad for your would-be lover or whatever, at least put their damn name on it so they know that they were the inspiration for this trash. Leaving it out just reeks of passive-aggressive “you’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you” style manipulation.
Tony – Jigglin’
I was hoping this would be one for the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey (which is in its final week so you’d better vote, just sayin’) but I’m sad to report that Tony and his friends do very little jigglin’ here, on either a physical or a musical level.
Clear:i – Quest
This is the sort of song I’d save for the Nugu Alert series, but I think that this will actually have exceeded the 20k view limit to be included by the time I end up publishing another Nugu Alert so I’ll just put it here instead. Anyway it’s painfully bad, with annoying screechy chorus vocals and the backing track far, far off in the distance.
BNK FearX feat. DGAF – Fearless Spirit
Why are these nerds posing on a sportball field when they’re playing e-sport? Anyway this song is just kind of dull and overloaded with junk that adds nothing to the experience, much like any League of Legends champion released after 2014.
Coda Bridge – Over The Line
Weak song but video mrds
Heya – My Way
Another terrible song but very mrds, big dog this time, not these trendy small dogs, Kerrigan May is applauding
Haeyoon – I miss you now
Haeyoon is ex-Cherry Bullet. This is what happens to girls when they leave C-list k-pop groups – straight to sitting-on-chairs ballad hell.
Sohyang – ‘Til You Love Me Again
Of course Sohyang paved the way, the reigning queen of sitting in chairs and boring us to death with ballads designed to show off how well she can sing while having no actual musical value whatsoever. This is the k-pop version of listening to Allan Holdsworth talk about scales.
U_Chae – Awake
No, don’t put the underscore in your name, U_Chae! It’s cursed! Look what happened to Fromis_9. Anyway underscore girl here was from Pixy and her song is actually pretty good which is why I’m bummed about the underscore. Someone please tell her.
QUEEN – Misirlou
A somewhat unfortunate name for this instrumental group, this song definitely made me want to break free from writing roundup.
Nanomal – Notnormal
This song traumatised me a bit so let’s have our non-Korean non-pop non-world-music feature here instead, yay! I’m not sure why it hasn’t occurred to me to put Beabadoobee in this feature yet but here she is and her songs are generally good, I think “Cologne” is the best one because sometimes she’s a bit too ballady for my taste but this song sort of hits the right slightly-rocking slightly-shoegazey mark and has a cool arrangement. Also every year in this feature there’s going to be one artist who I feature in these who I bias more than anybody in any k-pop group, last year it was Baby Storme for her authentic goth styles and this year it’s Beabadoobee because she’s a dead ringer for a cute girl who used to work the bar at a venue my bands played at a lot and that’s important to me for no particular reason so I’m going to put it in here because it’s my website and I can and if you don’t like it that sucks for you, doesn’t it.
Park Minjung – Bunny Bunny
Back to Korean things and I’m not quite sure what the lore is around this but it popped up in my recommends and it sounds appropriately insane so it can go in here. Actually a rare example of a Korean song these days with a little too much going on in the harmony, I feel like this song needed to keep it simple and lean a bit more into the doof-doof music for the chorus.
Seo Eve – KungKungDda
Seo Eve has the right idea. She must have gotten fucking huge off the back of the brilliance that was “Malatanghulu” because this new song of hers (which is so similar it might as well just be a remix) has her crushing on Yunho from ATEEZ in the video. You know that she for sure put him first in the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey. I hope she has a big future.
Kim Churi – That’s Cool
Trot music is really discovering the speed in 2024. I support this trend, even if the song here is a little weak, because it means we’ll get some more bangers soon.
SWJA – What the hell
SWJA had a surprise good review last week so now she’s gone and fixed that by being dull again. This song does have a pretty good rock explosion near the end though but it’s really not enough.
Cacophony – Don’t Tell My Papa
Cacophony are always doing something different, and this is pretty different… for Cacophony, anyway. Two rock songs stapled together and it kind of works, but something’s missing somewhere. Probably a guitar solo, or maybe just some more natural-sounding rock instrumentation. Oh well, it’s still good.
Henny – La Barbie
Oh jesus, what is this. It’s fucking cool as fuck. I have no idea who Henny is and I was going to put her into Nugu Alert because her music video is so inexplicably slept on until I realised she had over half a million Instagram followers – goddamn, she definitely doesn’t need my help, in fact I probably need hers, she should be promoting me on her Instagram instead. Roundup’s definitely not going to get better than this so let’s just leave it here.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
beautyssi – the genre trends of 1st gen kpop
It’s worth remembering that k-pop’s lame trend-riding isn’t new and that k-pop songwriters have always just straight-up copied whatever was popular elsewhere in the world. The new trend-riding is actually pretty good compared to what was happening before, because back then they mostly didn’t have the production smarts to even do all that good of a job, so a lot of the old stuff sounds kind of dull and indistinct. Even SM were releasing songs for their top-tier groups with poorly-compressed vocals and muddy mixes. Mind you I personally would like another “UK hard house” trend because that stuff is hilarious and the producers these days would have the ability to do it a lot better. “UK hard house” in quotes of course because nobody sensible really believes that dance music genres are a thing, just because you can change a drum pattern from “default beat 1” to “default beat 2” on your drum machine doesn’t make it a new genre.
IVE – Acciendo
Just a PSA for you that IVE’s “Acciendo” MV which was removed from YouTube for copyright a couple days ago is now back. No need to panic, kids. Probably a false claim by someone trying to cash in, or something mundane like a rights transfer. Anyway the universe is safe.
Ivy – A-HA
Decades before Azealea Banks and Baby Storme perfected the art of torpedoing their own careers by having a mouth and an opinion about a thing, k-pop singer Ivy did her dash with the entire Korean industry at the height of her fame in the late 2000s by calling out singers at the time for not being able to sing (which of course meant about 80% of people in idol pop, so everyone took offence). Not that she’s exactly putting in much work herself here, but then maybe that’s for the best, k-pop didn’t need more vocal wank excursions back then and it doesn’t need them now. Ivy also had multiple sex scandals attached to her (although none which were proven) and was a favourite whipping post of trashy netizens in the Golden Age before they eventually got distracted by T-ara. These days her legacy of content is hard to track down and you know that nobody gives that much of a fuck about you anymore when your official reupload of a fairly racy song by today’s k-pop standards is in 480p with incorrect aspect ratio.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week! And remember that this is your last week to vote in the Kpopalypse 2024 Objectification Survey – do it caonima!
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