Welcome to my K-Pop review blog! Kick up your feet! Relax a moment! Find a new favorite song or remember an old favorite. And remember, you can't spell NU'EST without LOVE.
Christmas Caroling: 2024 Edition
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This will be updated throughout the month as I'm going to include as many of the new holiday or winter songs as are released as I can find. If I missed any, which is likely, please yell at me. I'm also going to include ten "oldies" just for a little bit of variety in age in no particular order. Hope you find one you haven't heard before. (Also, the Country Kko Kko album that song comes from has Feliz Navidad in Korean on it and when I tell you that I giggled, my dog was worried because I haven't laughed that hard in a while. It's a glorious song and breaks my brain a little.)
JUST KIDDING! I'm actually including a bonus 11th because I've been very good about not blabbing about NU'EST constantly, and I'm going to reward myself with sharing the Christmas song they did with Orange Caramel. Babies. It was the year they debuted, and they were all seventeen except for the elderly Aron at the ripe age of nineteen. This will be a staple in all of the Christmas posts because I love it so much, and it's my Christmas gift to me and you.
Orange Caramel, NU'EST
Dashing through the snow in highheels
Now, that I've gotten that out of my system here are the Christmas/holiday/winter songs released in (mostly) December 2024. If I did a review of it, I'll also include it just for sake of ease and completion's sake.
Release date: 2024 October 16 Album tracklist: remembrance c andy , trampoline, Bluerose, BTTB (Back to the Basics), shame, dream diary ~ etching mémoires of midnight rêverie Album runtime: 20 minutes I'm aware of one of the members of the group by name and know she and one of the other members came off hiatus earlier in the year. I'm always relieved when a member on hiatus for whatever reason becomes active again, and I hope she is doing well. I also believe this is the first full group album in a while, so that's also an exciting moment. I'm also aware of the recent controversy of the use of AI in promotional/album artwork for this album, or this particular single. I'm not entirely sure. I also do not condone the use of generative AI in artwork. But that's something to be aware of. Audience participation snapping? Be still, my soul. There are a couple of sections where you could actually have audience participation clapping as well, which ...
We just had a whole lot of b-sides for July, but a bunch of those were buried tracks. This one, this one is iconic, so iconic, in fact, that when I was thinking about what songs to do for August, that was when I found out that this and another one that I'm planning are both b-sides. I genuinely thought it was a title track. These two songs are also songs that you regularly see pop up in the K-Pop compilation videos that get posted on YouTube, so if you're like me and watch those regularly but also haven't actually heard this song yet, here's your chance to find out why it's in all of those videos delivered to you on a silver platter. I've done all the groundwork for you here. The other kind of funny thing is that both songs I was considering started off life as a b-side and then became a Japanese debut for the group. What's the other song I'm talking about? You'll find out. You can blame the order of these posts on my EXO-L friend (and now Baby Stay...
I love when I get suggestions for groups that I've heard of but haven't actively listened to. I know that f(x) has several songs that are on the list of K-Pop influential songs that pretty much everyone should be familiar with, if they don't know them. I don't think this is one of them, because this is a b-side, but I could also be wrong. Which is why I like being able to dig into the albums and the songs a little bit. So, this comes from their second studio album Pink Tape, released in 2013, which won a bonsaeng in 2014 at the GDAs, and hit number 1 on multiple music charts worldwide. One of the songs on the album was originally supposed to be Ariana Grande's song, and f(x) got it instead. So that's pretty cool. It's the second track on the album and is described as creepy pop, which I am down for entirely and that was one of the reasons why this song was suggested for me to do as the suggestion included the note that I seem to really like eerie or otherw...
Okay. We're going to start off with a big congrats to the freshly debuted soloists who got wins this week! It's a little amusing to me that we have two SM winners. But congrats to everyone involved! Also, holy wow Dayoung is pretty. For the After School Club re-run while they're still on hiatus, I actually picked this one before I found out who the The Show winner was, so this was just a happy coincidence. This is ep. 372 from 2019 with WJSN as the guests and Jamie, Heejun, and Woosung from The Rose as the hosts! I couldn't find a good clip of them performing Boogie Up there so I used their The Show performance instead because those two shows are on the same channel. And as always, the links down in the table go to my reviews, if you have any curiosity there. Enjoy what performances I could give you! Show Champion: aespa "Rich Man" MCountdown: aespa "Rich Man" Music Bank: Haechan (NCT) "CRZY" Show! Music Core: aespa "Rich Man...
I'm one song behind in my plan, which is a little frustrating. But I may be able to make it up. Also, quiet shout-out to whoever is reading this little blog from Seychelles. That country popped up in my statistics recently and I've got a huge fondness for them because during eighth grade, that was the country my friend had to do her report on (it was a massive project ranging from planning a vacation in the foreign language class to talking about an issue the country has in English class to writing a paper on the history of the country in history class). So, hello! Welcome! You have a beautiful country and I'd love to visit one day. What does this have to do with this song? Well, just like a country doesn't need to have a lot of landmass or a population that's in the top ten biggest in the world to have an impact on someone, a song does not need to be a title to have an impact. This song just happened to start off life as a b-side and then become the debut track fo...
I thought I'd be able to get these done so I could go into August caught up. Alas. As always, links in the spreadsheet go to my reviews. Show Champion: AHOF "Run To You" MCountdown: ATEEZ "BAD" Music Bank: Yeonjun "Ice Cream" Show! Music Core: Yeonjun "Ice Cream" Inkigayo: I.O.I "Suddenly" ASC Performance: N/A The Show: N/A The Extra Stage: UDTT "Viper"
[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-...
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 ...
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...
Release date: 2024 March 18 Album tracklist: Welcome to the Show , HAPPY , The Power of Love, Get The Hell Out, Sad Ending, Let Me Love You, didn't know Album runtime: 24 minutes If it seems odd that I'm reviewing a song that came out in March, you would be correct. I wasn't intending to, but events being such as they are and my ridiculous ideas being what they are, here I am. This is also going to royally mess with my organization system for the moment, but that means I'm going to have to do a couple of March reviews to pad out the page this inevitably goes into. I'm making more work for myself with the weekly wins on the music shows. Hence this seven-month-late review. So look for that. Enough whining from me! Congrats on the win, DAY6! From the bottom of my heart, even though I'm sad you had to beat NU'EST's record, I'm glad you're did beat it, and now you've gotten a couple of wins on different songs in the last few weeks. The title is v...
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