Song Review:: Kai (EXO): Adult Swim (Pre-Release)

• Release date: 2025 April 21

• Album tracklist: Wait On Me, Walls Don't Talk, Pressure, Ridin', Off and Away, Adult Swim, Flight to Paris

• Album runtime: 19 minutes

 And because I'm so far behind, I'm going to start with them as I want to. And since I saw a gifset of Kai this morning on Tumblr, what with him being too pretty for words and whatnot, I went "Hey, who says I have to do any of this in any sort of order? Who cares?" And just because Kai is too pretty, but also because I'm actually excited to see what he's up to post-military and I've been depriving myself. Happy thirteenth anniversary to all the members of EXO, by the way! I don't know precisely when it was The run time is not it though. That's not even two and a half minutes. Please, SM. Please don't be doing this too. Please do one thing right for your groups and artists.

We've got a really good beat to the song. I particularly like the build up at about the minute forty-five mark which swells through the two minute mark and then settles back down to the final twenty or so seconds of the song and almost transforms it into a completely different song from the somewhat mild and tempered start. But it's not enough. Kai deserves so much more than this repeated, muted mush of a song. It's not over-cooked oatmeal, which is good, but it doesn't have much distinct texture other than that aforementioned section.

I have Kai linked closely to Taemin in my head, in part because they've apparently been best friends since 2008 or earlier, and partly because they're cut from the same cloth of peerless performer and star-powered stunners. They aren't just singers or dancers; they have transcended beyond that to be truly iconic. And you're going to give a song that spends part of its time murmured, part of its time like a sing-song-y nursery rhyme, and most of its time trapped in a repetitious circle to someone like this? That's like...I don't know, giving a song like this to Janet Jackson or Sammy Davis Jr. or Elton John. I love that he's got such a lovely deep voice in spots, but I'm just disappointed that he's been given milquetoast to work with.

I like the shout-out to his second mini album in the music video. His dancing is incredibly smooth, his stylists need a raise, and he really is just uncommonly pretty. There's a tiny bit of a storyline to this music video, which mostly functions as a seduction piece more than anything else, but you will not find me complaining overmuch about it. This is styled very much as a summery song, which is a little amusing for those of us who are me considering it's only April and that's very much still spring, but he can get a head start on the summer releases. That's fine.