Song Review:: Baekho (NU'EST): OFF-ROAD

• Release date: 2025 March 14

• Album tracklist: OFF-ROAD

• Album runtime: 2 minutes

...I would have done this sooner, but the car accident put a slight damper on my productivity. In other news, coloring is really nice when you're having a lot of emotions and you don't want to actively do anything about them. 

Happy Thirteenth Anniversary, Baekho. I hope you find a good home.

And this is just over two minutes. Baekho. My dude. Why.

Okay. We've got a very warm set of instrumentals here. It actually feels like sunshine, and I'd think that even if the cover art didn't look like it does. Even though the the percussion is quite prominent throughout the song in a rather repetitious way, it's soft enough that the song feels comforting rather than exciting. But the problem, and I'm noticing that it's particularly infectious among HYBE artists to have songs that round to two minutes long (I'm thinking specifically of TxT, Enhypen, and Seventeen because I remember being frustrated with both of their comebacks last year over the song length, but I'm sure that if I went digging, I'd find more examples), is that it's too short. Too much has been stripped from the song to give it a bite-sized, easily stream-able length. And I know that Baekho isn't one of the dancers in the group, nor would it be appropriate for an EDM dance break for the song, but any amount any kind of dance break would help to, literally, break up the song, give it a burst of some sort going into the climax. Where's a bridge? Why have the bridges been stolen from the songs? What does HYBE have against bridges and dance breaks?

Parts of the melody sound like Lilli Yabbay by Seventeen. It's got the same smooth glide and a similar affectation to his vocals that Seventeen's song has. Again, it's something interesting considering he's not one of the dancers (please refer to the Game Caterer where he and Minhyun discuss just buying the coffee trucks themselves because there's no way they'll win it). The other thing that's frustrating here is Baekho has a big voice. Baekho has a distinct voice. Do you hear any evidence of this? No. It's so smooth that if I didn't know this was Baekho, I wouldn't be sure it was. Whatever has been done to his voice, it doesn't sound like him. If you told me this was by a member of Monsta X, I'd believe you (I don't know any of their voices well enough to know that they're even in Monsta X). I appreciate that we've got a little bit more of his lower notes, but when he goes up into falsetto, somewhere that I at minimum should recognize him, it still doesn't really sound like him. The lyrics feel like him though.

No music video. I am severely displeased by this. (this also implies some things to me, but this isn't a conspiracy theory blog, so I won't mention them.