Song Review:: Se So Neon: NOW- NOW

• Release date: 2025 August 15

• Album tracklist: Twit Winter, Remember!, New Romantic, NOW, Secret Police, Small Heart, Eden, Jayu, Kidd, 3 Revolution, p and q, O

• Album runtime: 44 minutes

 They're the only one currently on the docket for today, so I'll use this time to get some of my backlog done. I'll check again later, but this is helpful. This is apparently a rock band down to one member, the only original founding member of the band, Hwang So-yoon. She's apparently been pretty vocal about social stuff and has gotten into trouble for it, but that's fine because it was about the Nth Room and that is something that I'm always going to support criticism against. Also, she worked with Hoshi and Woozi on Pinocchio, which is my favorite of their subunit songs, but it's also ludicrously, obnoxiously short. Which, after looking at the runtime, isn't something that I need to worry about with this album because there are multiple songs that are longer than four minutes, and one that's almost five. There are a bunch of singles from this that have been released over the years as well, so I'll eventually have to go in and mark all of them.

This is a good, solid lead up to the song. The meat of the song is very weighty and rather slow, making it feel a lot like 90s punk rock. I'm thinking specifically of The Cranberries as a good comparison. There were also a lot of different bands on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as Charmed, and honestly, this song would fit right in with either set. So it has a strong nostalgia sense for me because those two shows kind of are my childhood, you know? But that's where the song is sitting for me.

All of what I said for the instrumentals basically applies to the vocals as well, but I'd like to add in a dose of the 70s. Does anyone else hear shades of The Carpenters? It's not the whole time, because again, this song is a little bit too punk rock, but the way the vocal effects make her voice sound remind me so much of both The Carpenters and The Cranberries. It's weirdly soothing over the guitar and the drums especially. There's also a really great range on display here, and the fact that this is my first introduction to the band, even if it's just down to Hwang So-yoon now (though Park Hyunjin did contribute in recording), does make me a little curious about the rest of the discography.

There's something intensely lonely about this music video, couple with the weird frame rate, to create a music video where you're not quite sure if you're awake or dreaming, because it has that kind of floaty quality to it. It's got some heavy overexposure through a lot of it, again, creating a very dreamy vibe. It also reminds me a lot of winter and snow, though.