Just A Little Fangirl Love

Release date: 2026 July 08 Album tracklist: RUN TO YOU , Sugar High, JUST SAY YES, You're the Reason, Our Story Album runtime: 15 minutes  I can listen to AHOF like I want to December of 2028 when the maknae turns eighteen. He was fifteen at debut, which unfortunately puts the group in Underage Protocol. Although he is currently sixteen, so if you're not quite as stubborn as I am and sixteen is your only hard limit, the group is good to go for you now. The group being in Underage Protocol does not change the fact that I have several of their songs sitting waiting in the playlist I have for songs by groups I can't listen to yet.  If this instrumental was slightly more acoustic, we'd have a country song on our hands. As it is, this song is also still so "boy groups" that I'm not surprised it's gotten a win already. The beat holds the song in place while the other pieces move around it, and while there is a dramatic late song interruption with specifical...

Release date: 2026 August 03 Album tracklist:  SODA SODA;  Palm Tree; If I'm S, Can You Be My N? - Japanese ver. Album runtime: 8 minutes  There are a few boy groups that debuted within the last couple of years that just scream summer to me, three of them being BOYNEXTDOOR, NCT Wish, and TWS, which is ironic given that two of them debuted in January. Japanese releases tend towards that bright sound anyway, so here's hoping the patterns are repeated. I was not expecting the disco today. I'm not complaining because this is bright and summery, perfect for a festival or a fan meeting, or once their discography gets a bit bigger, perfect for their inevitable fun section of a concert. The instrumental has everything from brass instruments to chimes and a very funky little guitar.  I love the "S-O-D-A" chant that pops up periodically. It's recognizable enough to make it a point of familiarity, but it's not so repetitive that it takes over the song. The song has h...

 [Insert the upside down smiley face here] In all seriousness, I know I'm very late, but I think I got through most of the reviews I wanted to do and it's time to do this. Otherwise I'll just keep putting it off and end up having to write it in December so that I can write my year-end wrap-up. Like last year. We're trying to avoid the stress I put myself through in December again. And spoiler for the songs I was listening to this month, it was a lot of NU'EST, so I'm only going to include the one I listened to the most rather than the four that would be included. For once, my top NU'EST listen was not FACE.  Debut time! Debuts I covered: NAZE , YUHZ , HEART OF WOMAN , AND2BLE , and H//PE PRINCESS . Debuts I didn't cover: FLARE U . Soloists whose debut I did not cover: J.Seph (KARD) (note: this is actually a draft so this will likely be finished at some point so this will be edited when I do) and Gabee (JAESSBEE) .  Songs I was looking forward to: I.O.I-...

Release date: 2026 July 24 Album tracklist: Ain't No Party Album runtime: 2 minutes  I know you all enjoy getting random updates about K-Pop in these introduction paragraphs. Or at least no one tells me they hate them (saying that would not make me stop doing this, by the way). Good news is that Spotify is getting better about telling me when the groups are releasing new music. The algorithm is finally figuring this out. Unfortunately, a lot of the "new songs" are AI and don't actually belong to the group. Ghost9, for instance, had 33 of them uploaded over a single weekend, and the weekend I started this review, I saw AI tracks that need to be reported for HotShot, LABOUM, BAE173, TIOT, and TFN. That just makes it harder for the legitimate songs and releases to get attention, especially with the older groups because if I was trying to get into K-Pop now, I'd be so confused and I might be a bit turned off from K-Pop as a whole. (Notice that I've also done a Gre...

 Welcome to August and the beginning of songs that could be considered "Events" in some way. It's what I'm calling this month, anyway. And we're starting with one of the technically milder songs, but still one of the bigger ones because of what this song did for the group. Cultural impact, not just a dinosaur-killing asteroid impact crater in terms of group popularity counts here in August, so you'll be seeing a range. Also, I'm going to quietly admit that I have fallen into my tendencies again for August, so you can expect boy groups to be b-sides and the girl groups to be title tracks and I really don't mean to do that as consistently as I do, so while I'm looking at the rest of the year, I'm going to have to be thinking about that tendency. Case in point, we have a girl group's title track to start out the month of August (my VIP friend picked this one from my list I was thinking about for August). AOA debuted in 2012 as an eight-member ...

 And here's our closer to the b-side month I decided to do. You know what's kind of funny? The first songs I reviewed are about to become eligible for Greatest Hits posts. Some of them are practically those posts in length already, so it would be interesting to see what I do with them now, especially now that I've had time to sit with some of them and performances have had time to happen. In the meantime, we've got a song that comes with mcuh recommendation from the K-Pop community at large and kind of a perfect way to bridge what I've been doing with July and the events that are going to happen in August. Because this kind of is an event on its own, but it's also a b-side by an artist I haven't covered. Win-win. Best of both worlds. Perfect bridge. And it has a bridge, which is a throwback to May. WJSN, also known as Cosmic Girls, debuted as a twelve-member group under Starship Entertainment back in 2016. I've actually got a pretty big soft spot for thi...