Song Review:: ODD YOUTH: I Like You- I Like You

• Release Date: 2025 April 15

• Album tracklist: Spooky, I Like You, Bubble Bubble, Hot Chicken, Bestie

• Album runtime: 15 minutes

 First comeback from my girls! Yes! You can find my reviews of their first two songs (Best Friendz and THAT'S ME respectively), and Best Friendz has an English version, and I just love them so much. That's a run-on sentence technically. I don't think I care. I still love Best Friendz so much. ODD YOUTH are still in their first six months, so to recap, by the end of their first year, they'll all be adults except the maknae who will still be eighteen by the end of this year, so I'm allowing myself to err on the side of ambiguity, and I really like them. 

Okay, I did a quick listen of the whole mini album, and I gotta say that Hot Chicken is a delight. It's so weird and also is such a strong song, and yes, I'm now partial to it, but I kind of wish they'd gone with that one for the title track because it's so weird. Would have been a nice statement for them to go the path of a group like Orange Caramel because they kind of feel like they're moving in that direction, but here we are. Can't have everything, sadly.

Instrumentally, this kind of splits the difference between Best Friendz and THAT'S ME. It's got the fun, bubbly sweetness of their debut song, with more of the street music of the other song from that single, along with a surprising amount of what sounds like horns, and a dramatic burst of quiet toward the end of the song. And then it's got some weird things going on at the very end of the song that don't feel like the end of a song, but rather seems more familiar as the start of a song. It's also got some sections where, yes, the song quiets a little, but it feels a little at odds with the quieter, what feels like more introspective moments.

Ignoring how I feel about Hot Chicken because that song is so good, they've got one song on the album that is the more ethereal style that is fairly common these days (Bubble Bubble), but generally, I've been impressed by how strong they feel vocally. They don't have any big bursts of vocals so that's still a question mark for the group as a whole, and I'd like to see what they could do with an After School or a Girl's Generation song for a cover to really let them flex some vocals (or if we wanted to be really interesting, give them an Infinite or Beast song (I know Highlight has their name back and are still going by Highlight, but I'm specifically thinking of songs from 2011-2013 for them when they were performing under their original name)). So even though we don't get big bursts of vocals, I'm still tentatively hopeful that we will eventually get one. Even when the members are going a little cuter in this song, their voices are still well-grounded for the most. They have a section where it's very dreamy, and that's the section where I think the vocals and the instrumentals clash a little more than I'd like, but generally, it does sound like they're getting to use their chest voices more than up in their head and falsettos.

Three seconds in and I'm already laughing. Okay, I know I said earlier that I wish Hot Chicken had been the title track because it reminds me of Orange Caramel and they're already headed down that path, but this is single brain cell blissfully skipping down that same path. They're not even walking. And if they start going with the weird songs too, they'll be loaded into cannons and fired. Metaphorically speaking, although I could certainly see them doing that in a music video. Their music videos are so, well, odd that their name is the single most appropriate thing I've seen since 2NE1's average age was 21 at debut, Winner was the winner of their survival show, and Dragon Pony's members' zodiac signs being the dragon or the horse (Seventeen's also almost qualifies since they were originally supposed to be a seventeen member group). Despite the weirdness, that's a strong storyline, and it's also incredibly heartwarming.