Song Review:: WayV (NCT): Big Bands- Big Bands

• Release date: 2025 July 18

• Album tracklist: BIG BANDS, Ice Tea, WOAH, Sad Eyes, Your Song, BIG BANDS - Korean Version

• Album runtime: 18 minutes

 It's a good time for me to finally get this one written. My apologies to the fans for being so late on this one. It got a music show win on The Show (still not bitter about this, it's fine) the end of July, and I've been meaning to do this since then; it just kept getting lower and lower on the immediately necessary.

So here's the thing. I actually love big bands. I spent about two years listening to basically only music from the 40s and 50s. I have a list of artists from then that if they weren't dead, I'd be eagerly awaiting new music from them (my glee with the V and Bing duet is partly due to the fact that a new(ish) Bing song dropped? Be still my soul). I've got some massive playlists that I love. Honestly, this feels like big band as imagined by hip-hop artists. It's actually a pretty cool combination and not one I would have thought would work, but more fool me. It's also surprisingly well balanced so neither part actually gets too much time or attention as well which again was a bit of a surprise, but I'm definitely not going to quibble over it. Actually. And I had to laugh when I realized this, the instrumental for this kind of reminds me of the Adam West Batman series. 

I was splitting my time between the Chinese version and the Korean version while listening to this. Vocally, this isn't very big band, which is really my only disappointment with the song. They could have done some incredible vocal work here, really leaning into the big band vibes with harmonies and delicious layers, but instead we get something that's more like the hip-hop-like pop music we normally hear, which would normally be perfectly fine, but it feels kind of like they gave up on the fusion concept.

Hot men dancing in pinstripe suits? If there weren't only two men that I would bark for, I'd be saying woof. That's hot. Sorry. Anyway. I'm still convinced that they're saying "Rockefeller", which coincidentally is the name that I use when trying to describe chaebols to people. While the 40s are a little bit after America's Gilded Age when the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts were in full-blown tycoon royalty mode, they still had enough prominence that I'm cool with a shout-out to them for something big band related. Sorry for the random, brief history. If I'd been a history major, it probably would have been for the Gilded Age (that or ancient Mesopotamia). I am very distractible for this. My apologies. This is a really entertaining music video and I was smiling through the entire thing. It's just fun. WayV are acting a bit like dokkaebi, which is even better and just add to the chaos. Alternatively, are they time travelers? Because that could be funny too. Just causing general chaos and I'm all about that. The choreography is great and so much fun. It scratches an itch for me.