Song Review:: NOWADAYS: Let's get it

• Release date: 2024 November 21

• Album tracklist: Let's get it

• Album runtime: 3 minutes

 This is the only song on the single. Please let me really like this one. I'm just waiting for a title track to love. For those of you who don't know the group, they're CUBE's newest boy group, debuted at the beginning of the year, and they were all full adults at debut. They've covered a B2ST song, which I absolutely loved, but I have yet to fall in love with one of their own title tracks. I know it'll happen. I'm just waiting for that day. I'm also waiting for them to release a title track that would round up to three-and-a-half minutes, again other than the B2ST remake, but I feel like I'm just being picky at that point.

Not going to lie, from the first little bit, I was expecting something more like APT. to come out of them, which would have been fine, but instead it went the exact opposite direction into very traditional, and now I'm thinking of old ghosts. That is actually a genuinely fascinating combination, to have the instrumentals be relatively slow and minimalistic, but then to have the vocals and rapping be much faster. Also the combination of more traditional sounds and more modern EDM is a fascinating combination and creates a really interesting vibe to the song. But then the total switch at 1:52, which is a little past the halfway point, was abrupt enough that I had to check and make sure it hadn't gone to another song, which makes it feel a little bit like drinking a delicious glass of orange juice, and then taking a bite out of a mint chocolate cookie. The two things on their own are good, but the abrupt transition of one to the other without some sort of a palate cleanser leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The transition back to the original orange juice, when it happens shortly after, is fine. It's not disconcerting that time.

What is beginning to be more troubling is once again the true lack of anything for the vocalists to sink their teeth into. Rainy Day remains the only example in a title track, which again is a remake of an B2ST song, where the vocalists get to be proper vocalists. I genuinely don't understand what CUBE is doing with this group. Either they need to finish turning NOWADAYS into a hip-hop group, or they need to give them songs with a melody and have them be a K-Pop group, and, I'm sorry to bring up BTOB in this instance, but this is the company that debuted B2ST, BTOB, and Pentagon, home of some absolutely incredible vocalists who clearly have gotten to be vocalists. I'd expect a group like this to come more out of YG or JYP, because that style fits more with what they have been putting out the last decade or so, longer in the case of YG. I genuinely do not understand, because it's not like they can't sing. Ticket from their debut single and both Heart vs Head and Troublesome from their first comeback single are genuinely good sounding songs with melodies that are at least present and accounted for. I want to love the group so badly, but I keep being thwarted by CUBE's choices for their title tracks, and I don't like it. The best part of the song doesn't even have words. It's the very end of the song, with some very catchy "nana"s. Even just sprinkling in a few of those through out the song to help break up the rap would have done well to at least let the group better pretend to be an idol group. The worst part is the members helped write it, which of course they did. Rappers write their own raps. But apparently they need to have Hui come in and do some producing and writing for them. Hui at least is still at CUBE. If they're going to be a hip-hop group, then they need to actually do that.

Oh, look. Posturing from a group that's only been around for about seven months. How novel. Even the music video is trying to have them be a hip-hop group, but the pesky vocalists are getting in the way. The choreography is great. The members seem to be very good dancers. The music video itself is very well-made, and I probably would believe it better from an older group. 

I am so frustrated with CUBE over this group. I'm frustrated with them in general, but this is worse than what Pledis did to NU'EST, and worse than that, I'm able to watch it happen in real time. In the meantime, I'll be here, waiting for CUBE to make a decision on what kind of group they're going to be.