Song Review:: TEEN TOP: Just 15, Just Teen Top- Cherry Pie

• Release date: 2025 August 21

• Album tracklist: Umbrella, Cherry Pie, Home Alone (But U), Ce Chaos, I Wanna Love 2025

• Album runtime: 14 minutes

 Mild disappointment in the old group because that runtime. However, Happy fifteenth anniversary, Teen Top! Good to see you alive and kicking! Even if I'm disappointed in them falling prey to that modern trend and even though that does make it slightly more difficult for newer groups when the older groups remain active, it's also good for the newer groups to see the older groups and how they interact to model their behavior after when it comes to interacting with other groups. It's like that one part of the book Lost World by Michael Crichton. The raptors didn't have older members of the pack to teach them how to behave and interact with the world as examples and so they were more feral than they should have been. The presence of the older groups is good because they provide both examples to aspire to as well as role models for appropriate behavior. Both PENTAGON and NU'EST were corrected by their seniors when they were young rookies because they weren't greeting well enough (BTOB's Eunkwang for Pentagon and Super Junior's Yesung for NU'EST). Both groups got a reputation for politeness after that. All roads lead back to NU'EST for me, it seems. My apologies. Also, fun fact about Teen Top in case you didn't know. They're company seniors to my girls, ODD YOUTH, and their company was founded by members of the first gen titan group, Shinhwa. (Also joining them at Top Media are 100%, UP10TION, and MCND.) Y'all know how much I love my girls, ODD YOUTH. Also, once again going back to Teen Top because it seems I'm very distracted today, this is their first release post military, because their 95z maknae was discharged this year. He was fourteen at debut, which wasn't okay then, but is also indicative of a larger problem that is not recent, however much we'd like to pretend it is. He's actually younger than I am, which breaks my brain a little. Anyway.

I was in the process of going "Okay, song, we've got some kinda grungy bits to you, so I'm down with this." And then we took a sharp into something a little more seductive and smoother. There are actually a lot of different moving pieces and parts to the song, which makes me happy to hear. It's one of my favorite things about K-Pop, because sometimes you can have like five different genres in a single song and that brings me joy. That guitar, though, it's probably my favorite part of the instrumental. And unless I'm losing it, I think there's a string. It's either a really low violin or maybe a viola, but it's definitely not low enough to be a cello. I don't think. Not entirely sure, but I love it.

So, funny thing, I was listening to the rest of the album, and I really like the entire thing, all the songs, but there were a couple that I was like "I'm glad this isn't the title track." So this song has a really good rapping rhythm specifically. The rapping flows so nicely with the beat and that guitar I love so much. But also, we have got vibrato and we've also got some very pretty ad-libs. The vibrato is the thing I was listening specifically for because this is an older group, and with older groups, vibrato goes from a "it would be nice if I got it" to more of a requirement. But it's fine, because they met my expectation. Score. Also, I really, really badly misheard some of those lyrics. My brain also made the lyrics a lot...more explicit than they actually are, so yay! That word at the end is "drop", by the way.

Y'all, they did a suit dance on 1theK and wow. That's going down underneath the music video.

This is a little bit of a weird music video, I'm not going to lie. It's tame compared to a lot of second gen music videos, but it's still a little weird. But that's also fine because there's a storyline. We get storyline, we get choreography, we get a proposal with a cherry. What else could we need?

And as I said, here's the suit dance. Because again, wow.