Song Review:: Bada (S.E.S): Love wave

• Release date: 2025 August 05

• Album tracklist: Love wave, Love wave (Inst.)

• Album runtime: 7 minutes

 I've got a special fondness for this woman. First of all, our birthdays are really close to each other, not by year, she's older than my older sibling. And second of all, my D&D character from my last campaign (overly friendly, spy undine druid with a massive fear of the undead) was named Pada (yes, I did that, yes I am that literal; I named a black kitten we had Blackie and an orange one Tiger, not to mention my beloved orange cat, Peaches). Plus, she's a queen of K-Pop like BoA is, a titan of industry, a torchbearer, and a path paver. The K-Pop landscape would likely look much different without her contributions and many of the later idols and groups may not have been able to debut as they did, if at all, without her. Also, congrats to her on being a mama (the congratulations is several years late, but I wasn't listening to K-Pop then) and it's good to see her coming back now that the baby is a little older. That was a lot of parentheses in this paragraph, but I just really think she's cool.

You know, I kind of love that she's centered so much of her singer career on water themes and motifs. It brings me a lot of joy. This one is going for the slow funk elements to combine with certain water effects that remind me of beach towns in video games, or the beach scene in a rom com. Overall, this creates a strongly chill environment that I'm not entirely sure is actually chill. Still, it's got a good flow to it, and I swear I'm not using water related words on purpose.

I genuinely love that she's made this part of her career because if you look at the lyrics, I don't know about the Korean, but the English certainly has a lot of swimming/water/ocean type words. The difference between Bada's voice and voices from later gen girl groups is that even though the tone and style is actually pretty similar to what we hear now, the amount of vibrato that rumbles through her voice if she even pretends to hold a note out is absolutely, stunningly incredible. It's present even in the middle of a line. It's a very pretty love song.

This woman is 45. Forty-five, y'all. She is so unbelievably stunning. Also, I'm enjoying the choreography, because it definitely does feel very first gen. This is basically a performance video with no storyline whatsoever, but three different costumes, and she's gorgeous. (Also I just discovered that she did a cover of Golden, so I'm going to have to go take a look at that after this.)