Song Review:: Hui (feat. Jang Hye Jin) (Pentagon): Nameless

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  • Release date: 2024 October 06
  • Album tracklist: Nameless

  • Album runtime: 5 minutes

 Hui has dropped a new single!! His voice is absolutely incredible, and I'm three-quarters in love with it. That's all. Carry on. Oh, and he's got an incredible producer ear too. Forgot to mention that part.

I love it when piano gets the main stage in songs, almost as much as I love acapella. And I get both in this song. But not only is the piano front and center in the instrumentals, but there are strings. There's audience participation snapping on the beat in a section, quiet and subtle unless you're looking for it. But the absolute swell of music in the most cinematic way he could have gone dominates the second half of the properly lengthened song, only for the instrumentals to stop to let their voices bloom and glow. I'm really struggling to focus on the instrumentals here because their voices bring tears to the eyes, and everything about the instrumentals enhances their voices in the best way possible. Even with the second half swell, it never overpowers their voices, which is a testament to their voices as well. We have piano. We have strings. We have an electric guitar. We have drums. We even kind of have a choir happening. This is a song that deserves repeat listening, and while I understand why we didn't get an instrumental track, I still desperately want one. 

This combination of the instrumentals and their voices literally brought tears to my eyes. That stretch of acapella is one of the most impressive things I've ever heard, not just in K-Pop but in any music. The quarter of my heart that was holding out has been completely won over. Goosebumps. Actual goosebumps. Their skill with their instruments, their voices, is so far on a display that it's in a famous museum surrounded by bulletproof glass and with alarms if you so much as breathe too closely to it. I got lost a little somewhere with the nouns in that metaphor, but the point still stands. And I have no idea who Jang Hye Jin is, but I'm at least halfway in love with her voice too. The quality, the texture, the timbre she has to her voice should be studied. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic here, which is a little concerning. 

This is it. This is the song of the month for me. I'm calling it now. I don't care what else comes out. The probability of something coming out that I love more than this song is so low, it's practically negligible. The only possible scenario I can think of here for something to beat it would be for, like, NU'EST to randomly drop a single. And while the odds of that happening are never zero, it's so low that it might as well be. Even BTOB and Seventeen likely couldn't beat this song. A collaboration of BTOB and Seventeen likely couldn't beat my love for this song. I'm not sure even a song of all of my favorites collaborating could do it. I was not expecting to be feeling like this this morning, but it is what it is. The number of playlists I added it to might have ended up in the double digits. This might even be song of the year for me.

The simplicity of the music video is, like the instrumentals, designed solely to support and highlight those voices. The darkness surrounding them. The single light. The plants growing. And the lyrics! This is a comfort song, a healing song, a shelter from the storm of life song.



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