Song Review:: RE:WIND: FOREVER {Debut}

• Release date: 2025 March 28

• Album tracklist: FOREVER

• Album runtime: 3 minutes

 I did not cover their pre-debut single, so I'll add that to my draft list since they debuted with the pre-debut single and their debut single and that's it. That's not a big sample size, but the more coverage they can have, the better as a newly debuted group. They're all adults, ranging from twenty-one to twenty-five, with none of them having had their birthday before their debut date, though in my delay in writing this does mean that the eldest has hit his. Speaking of the eldest, whose name is Lei, he loves BTOB, tennis, and Pentatonix, all things I also love. So I have tentative hopes. Plus, they're a March debut, and you know how I love me a March debut. Almost all of my first love groups that didn't stem from another group have been March debuts (literally my first four were all March debuts, and I just keep picking up more on accident). So fingers crossed with this one. I do say that the song is three minutes long, and I did round up for that, but it's very, very close to a full three minutes.

Do note that the song is majority in English, with a few lines or words or phrases in Korean, so essentially the exact opposite of most K-Pop releases.

This song is so 90s American boyband, I can't even. If you took this instrumental and attached it to Backstreet Boys or NSYNC or 98° or New Kids on the Block, I wouldn't know the difference, and in fact, I'd be super excited to be getting a new song from them. It's got moments where it leans a little hip-hop, mostly during the rapping, but holy crap, I'm so excited about this. It hits the part of my brain that yearns for the boybands that I don't get sound-wise from most of the K-Pop groups (I have found a few like that, but nothing as a recent release, let alone as a debut.) And it even has that big, dramatic boom at the end that you often hear that almost sounds like an explosion, but isn't.

Continuing with this, yeah, it really just scratches the 90s boy bands itch. It's not technically very K-Pop, so for the people who care about that, this might not be a good song for you. Me, this sound is what I grew up on because of my older sister, so this is exactly what I already enjoy hearing. And one of them, I suspect it's Lei, has such a gorgeous, low voice that's a great counterpoint to the higher voice, and has a different texture from the rapper. It's not down in the basement, though I think if he went for basement notes, he could make it and it would be very solid. But while we don't get any big, bold demonstrations of vocal ability, the sample size for the group is very small, and because one was in an a cappella group, I have tentatively high hopes.

Even the music video reminds me of those boy bands. There's more choreography than in the typical 90s boy band music video, which is to be expected because this is ostensibly a K-Pop group, but the vibes, the outfits, the styling, even the lighting feels so 1990s that I'm struggling to remember that not a single one of them was born with a 1 in the front of their birth year. The white outfits particularly scream Backstreet Boys to me. And the scene in the rain? Nice. There's even a little bit of a storyline going on, especially with the ending scene.