Song Review:: EPITHYMiA: The Arrival of Remain- Our time {Japanese}

• Release date: 2025 June 29

• Album tracklist: Our time, We Remain, The Arrival of Remain

• Album runtime: 9 minutes

 Okay, this is a departure from literally everything else I've done and that's fine, because you know what? There I am, getting on Youtube to go do the review for NMIXX's pre-release. And I really hate that YouTube on the app does that thing where it opens shorts first because I rabbit hole so easily. I hate it. Genuinely hate it. Second least favorite feature YouTube has done in recent times. But it has done two things for me (bear with me, this paragraph will be long, or you can skip it and go straight to the review paragraphs). First, it informed me that Park Je Up, my beloved Grim Reaper Boy from Build Up does lives nearly every morning where he spends most of them singing. Lovely thing to listen to while I get ready for work. Second, and now related to why I'm suddenly doing a review for a Japanese boy group, I got on to get to NMIXX's song, got dragged into fifty rabbit holes because of the stupid shorts, and then found out they were doing a live. And I couldn't immediately tell what country they were from because they were dancing to kpop and if they're a kpop group, or if they're a pre-debut group, they have my attention. Also, one of them looks a bit like a young Peniel from BTOB and one looks a bit like Changbin from Stray Kids. So I had to wait until they started talking and then comments popped up in Japanese. Clocked them as a jpop group.  Then the next song they did the dance for was Rock by Stray Kids. I did a screen recording to send to my Stay friend. Then I got off to go look them up some more. Debuted last March (to which I went "Of course they did. Why am I not surprised?"), but I did automatically feel the need to check on ages,  which I do for all debuts in the last four years. At which point I wasn't pleasantly surprised. I was genuinely surprised. Y'all, they've got 90s babies in the group. And the youngest is an '02. And one of them is half-Chinese, half-Korean, born in Japan, and learned Korean from kdramas. He apparently really loves kpop. That's an entertaining fact and now I'm really curious. So I flipped back to the live to see if they were still going, and I just left it on (they should be due for a new release, I think there may be something happening this month, but I understand less Japanese than I do Irish). They did IDOL by BTS, Lilli Yabbay by Seventeen, View by SHINee, and Super by Seventeen. Other than the accident that put one of them on the floor during IDOL, which sent the others into fits of laughter, they're impressive in terms of dance. I haven't listened to their music yet, but I'm tentatively hopeful. So I'm going to do this one, get this long explanation out of the way for why I'm suddenly departing from my norm now so that when they drop their new song, I won't have to repeat this again. But what cemented my sudden love for them was the exact date of debut. I recognize that it's incredibly easy for groups and artists to get adopted by me. But the single fastest way is to love the same things I love and to have a debut date the same as NU'EST. So, here we are. I know almost nothing about them, but I am fully supportive of them and their adultness as well as their obvious love of kpop. I'm not sure which is the title track because I don't seem to be able to find a music video, so I'll just do the one with the most streams. It's also the longest, but that's not why I chose it. Just a happy coincidence.

It almost annoys me how much I like this group already. At least this single is so far in my wheel house that at the end of this song, all I could do was sigh. It's fine, you know? I apparently needed another group to listen to and fill up all this time I don't have.

I'm about to use the words I haven't used in ages: audience participation snapping! That's right, included in this soft and beautiful instrumental is audience participation snapping! We've got a lovely piano with the percussion holding the beat, and we've got a couple of different varieties of that beat, which makes my variation needing brain so, so happy. But I love how the piano is included, because there are a couple of points where it's just piano, some where it's just percussion, and some where it's both piano and percussion, and the way that the two elements work with and against each other is actually quite intriguing. Kudos to the writer and producer. There's enough movement to the piece that it keeps you from getting too complacent and turning it into background noise.

There's a lot of singing in this one, so my hip-hop loving friends reading this (yes, I count you as my friend although we've never spoken and I know nothing about you, though I have likely overshared) may not be as enthused about this as I am. And that's fair. I'm a lot pickier with my rapping much like you probably are with your singing. Their voices are a little higher than I prefer, but I also can hear the specific timbre that you get from fully mature voices. But, on the whole, I very much like this sort of sound. It's really quite lovely. It is a little weird because the accent I'm hearing isn't the one I'm used to, which makes sense considering this group is Japanese speaking Japanese, not Korean speaking Japanese, but it is a little weird. In terms of kpop groups that they sound like, they're like VIXX singing a ballad, or well, honestly a little bit like TWS. Which is a really big stretch vocally, but there are bits that sound like one and bits that sound like the other. One of the higher voices sings a little more nasally than I like, so it's a bit jarring, but I assume it's a stylistic or training thing that I'm just not familiar with as the majority of the Japanese songs I listen to are OSTs for anime.

No music video, which feels a little weird, but this is a very small group.