Song Reviews:: RESCENE- Glow Up- Glow Up

• Release date: 2025 February 05

• Album tracklist: Crash, Glow Up, Going On, In my lotion, Cotton Candy

• Album runtime: 15 minutes

 A title track that is two and a half minutes long. Less than, technically. Ah, well. First review back from the flu, a shorter one is likely a better option to get back into the groove of things. Plus, the group is going to be on After School Club, so I wanted this one specifically done and out of the way before then. And with a quick check, this is one of those groups where the maknae was too young at debut for me to listen to the group, and she won't turn 18 for a while. So, if I like it, it goes into the "Can't listen yet" playlist.

This strength of this song relies on the deep percussion and the bass to hold the song and ground it. There are places that lack that, but rather than weakening the song, those places provide a decent enough change of texture and pace to prevent the song from being too monotonous. It is good that the song prefers to step off the bass rather than to occasionally step onto the bass as that allows Glow Up to have a lift of controlled freedom rather than unmoored pinwheeling through the upper ranges of notes and only occasionally dropping back down to earth.

Whatever is going on with the rapping at the beginning makes it so that it sounds less supported than the immediately following singing, which is interesting. Normally, we hear the exact opposite with the rap being the only properly breath supported sections and surrounded by vocalists that have been prevented from doing so as well. The repeated "Glow up"attempts to be catchy, though it's more grating than catchy, but thankfully it's a small section even for the short runtime, which increases the charm. But I also don't think that I'm inspired to shout about this song from the rooftops in a grandiose display. It's fine. I don't dislike it. It just is what it is without any big bursts of energy or saturated color to the song.

And even looking at the thumbnail, it's a little... If the walls were Millennial Gray, I'd be so unsurprised by this. It's my least favorite trend among my generation because even though I wear a lot of black and gray, I like to surround myself with big pops of color, especially with my nails. Life is not meant to be lived in a single color palette.

But that's also my biggest problem with the music video. It's a lot of white and light blue. Occasionally, we get some light yellow. But where is the saturation? Where are the jewel tones? This is a song about growing up, but instead of the colors matching that and becoming more rich, and sometimes clashing, with the variation of experience, they're shades of colors that are easily covered up, like the experiences don't matter. There's an entire cloud sequence where they're all in white, and rather than having something strong to contrast that, it's once more in a shade of pastel blue. Maybe it's just me and my association with pastels being for young children and early spring, but it feels like the music video, because of the colors, is actually working against the message of the song.