Song Review:: Irene (Red Velvet): Biggest Fan- Biggest Fan

-

  • Release date: 2026 March 30
  • Album tracklist: Biggest Fan, Best Believe, Don't Wanna Get Up, Face To Face, Million Miles Away, Love Can Make A Way, SPIT IT OUT, Black Halo, MTV (My Timeless Video), Wasteland
  • Album runtime: 30 minutes

 Irene's first album! Whoo! I'm curious and excited about this, because she's got a good voice, and seventy percent of the songs are over three minutes, so I'm pleased.

If this doesn't have some really good choreography to it, I'm going to be sad. There's a very good beat to it, and the drums hold that line really well. There's just not really a lot of variation in the rhythm with that beat, even when we have different sections of what is going on above it come in. You can practically set a metronome to it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's just something that never has a spot where my attention gets caught because something big has changed. 

I did check to make sure that this wasn't her solo debut, because it's woefully underwhelming to be performing in that capacity. As a comeback though, not bad. I'm not a big fan of the way that it starts off in that whispered rapping that reminds me a lot of some aespa songs. Same company, so that makes relative sense, but it doesn't give a lot of strong texture for the listener to hold on to at the start of the song. Especially after the "la la la"s that set a specific tone, which is then completely negated by the whispered rapping. It does strengthen up later, even if it never truly goes big or bold. I'm also not a big fan of how repetitive the chorus in particular is. It's fine. There are nine other tracks for me to search through for a song to grab me. I'm sure there is one. Wasteland in particular has piqued my interest.

I giggled so hard at the headlines in this music video. "Irene proves why she is the biggest visual in 'Biggest Fan'". Not that I think she's not beautiful, because she objectively is. The headlines just amused me a lot. This is a woman-dominated music video, and I love that for it. I really do.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The World of K-Pop in 2025

-
Image
 Come one, come all to the 2025 recap from your 15th favorite Fangirl! We had a lot of very fun and special moments throughout the year and some absolutely killer albums dropped. This is going to be a beast of a post, so please buckle up. I will attempt to be entertaining, but that means there may be puns and quips involved. I'm also going to scatter random stages from this year throughout the post, just to break things up, and so you can have some music, although I did include that big playlist that I was forming throughout the year. I also included the pet tax, because I talk about them often across all sorts of posts, so you can look forward to that.  Here's your first brain break! Make sure that you've got something to drink! Reading is thirsty work! I'm going to break this up into sections so you can Ctrl+F your way through to each section depending on your interests and how much time you have. And I'll give you a table of contents, because I love table of cont...
Read more

Greatest Hits:: VIXX: VOODOO DOLL

-
Image
 This comes from my submission form, and it's the first one I'm doing from there! Whoo! I was going to put this off a little because I just did a 2012 debut for a Battle of the B-Sides post, but oh, well! I have a feeling that this one isn't like that song either, so I'm less worried about doing too much of the same. Variety, yes, but I can do what I want and the few songs I've already heard of theirs ( Chained Up is in many of my playlists) I've liked already. How much of that is because I know they're in the 2012 debut club, which automatically enters them into my category of groups I look upon favorably, I don't know. But I do know that even without that, what I've heard is very good. I've also heard some interesting and hilarious things about the group, and am curious to know if they're true or not. But! This submission came with the note that the submitter was pretty sure this song was VIXX's first win and that was why it was being ...
Read more

Greatest Hits:: IVE: Love Dive

-
Image
 I was honestly wondering when I was going to get a submission for a group that has been getting awards specifically because they've been getting awards. Well, that has finally happened. I'm assuming it was a DIVE that dropped this submission for me, although I've also never had a submission specifically asking me for other kpop groups covering the song in question. So this one took a little bit more time in that I had to hunt down some covers. It was an intriguing request. I appreciate it. I'm also combining it with an earlier submission that I got for this song, but hadn't gotten around to doing yet. That  submission wanted me to make sure that I included a specific performance from the 2022 Gayo Daejeon, so the timing for it is actually perfect. Two submissions for the same song, everyone! This is exciting for me. Love Dive is the first of two tracks on their second single. Because this song was submitted with comments on the awards, we're going to start wit...
Read more

Song Review:: ITZY: TUNNEL VISION- TUNNEL VISION

-
Image
Release date: 2025 November 10 Album tracklist: Focus, TUNNEL VISION , DYT, Flicker, Nocturne, 8-BT HEART Album runtime: 16 minutes   I don’t usually touch the remixes, but I figure that since one came out today, I’d take the opportunity to cover the original since I haven’t done that yet and I generally like ITZY. I worry about getting too invested in them because girl groups I like don’t seem to do too well. Disbandments. Hiatuses. It’s not good, and I don’t like it because I want to like more girl groups. Not that there aren’t hundreds of already disbanded ones I could get into, but I want some that I can actively support, you know? Funny thing about that run time, if you remove the first track, which only clocks in at around a minute-and-a-half, the average runtime goes up to three minutes. The instrumental is fairly uncomplicated, but very strongly afrobeats. I'm not sure if it's fully within the genre, but it's at minimum afrobeats-flavored. This is going to have som...
Read more

Battle of the B-Sides:: LE SSERAFIM- Impurities

-
Image
 Well, well. Considering what time of year this is (less than a week before Halloween), I was looking through my To Do playlist, looking for something a little spooky, and while this isn't my favorite song from the album, I did recognize the album artwork and took a listen out of curiosity. It was not a suggestion on The Form , which is fine, but it was a message on Tumblr. So, as soon as this is finished, I'll be forwarding that to you. I hope you enjoy it! Impurities  is the third track on their second mini album, released in October of 2022. So, hilariously, that's actually suitable for this as well. It's a really long list of people given writing credit, so I'll worry about them in a moment, but who is recognized as the producer is really interesting: 13. 13 is a producer team comprised of Score (who spent a lot of time at SM for Taemin and Jonghyun, but also for LE SSERAFIM in general), Megatone (also quite a bit of time with Score for SM, Block B, and also LE ...
Read more

Song Review:: NEXZ: Beat-Boxer- Beat-Boxer

-
Image
Release date: 2025 October 27 Album tracklist: Legacy, Beat-Boxer , I'm Him , Co-Star, Next To Me Album runtime: 14 minutes  Okay, time for the title track. I'm looking at the title runtime and just being a little disappointed in it, although there is a song that's over three minutes so after I write this, I'm going to be taking a look at that one in hope that one specifically is really good. Not that I'm not also hoping to really like Beat-Boxer, but it's the length, you know? This is a surprisingly sparce instrumental for a lot of the song. It's got moments where it gets a bit more energetic and full, but for the most part, it's at most a quiet beat behind the vocals, which is a lot of rapping. There are also some interesting science fiction warbles and what sounds faintly like alarm sirens. It's an interesting combination, I'm not going to lie, but at the same time, as much as this would probably make a great workout song (ignoring the title f...
Read more

Song Review:: BAE173: NEW CHAPTER: DESEAR- What’s Wrong? {Pre-Release}

-
Image
Release date: 2025 October 03 Album tracklist: What's wrong? Album runtime: 4 minutes   So apparently neither of these two pre-releases are actually on the mini album. That’s a bit of a surprise and I don’t understand why, but whatever. It’s fine. Also, this is almost a four minute song, so I am happy as a clam right now.  This has a very 80s sound, and I love that for it. What I love more is that there’s a very distinct EDM dance break that completely changes the sound of the song, and there are two separate sections for the dance break. I didn’t like EDM dance breaks until I started listening to K-Pop and now here I am being excited over them. Crazy how your musical taste can change. But what I love most is the even rarer key change. I adore key changes, and it’s not very often that recent K-Pop has a key change. It’s rare enough in music, but recently it’s been harder to find than a Millennial without a crippling caffeine addiction. They really elevate both complexity and v...
Read more

Song Review:: Cravity: Dare to Crave:Epilogue- Lemonade Fever

-
Image
Release date: 2025 November 10 Album tracklist: Lemonade Fever;  OXYGEN; Everyday;  On My Way; SWISH;  SET NET GO?! ; Rendez-vous; PARANOIA; Straight Up To Heaven (Sung by Jungmo, Woobin, Seungmin); Stadium (Sung by Allen, Wonjin, Hyeongjun); Marionette (Sung by Serim, Minhee, Taeyoung); Underdog; Click, Flash, Pow; Love Me Again; Wish Upon A Star Album runtime: 45 minutes   Okay, Cravity. Let’s see what you have for us this time. The album is just shy of a three-minute average, and would actually have been achieved if this song had been three minutes long. Interestingly, I've done reviews for at least a couple of the songs on the album, so when I finish this up by putting in all of the above information that you’ve already seen because I have it first even if I write it last, I’ll have to compare album tracklists. We’ve also got some partial unit songs. I’m not going to call them official units, because I don’t know if they are or not, but it’s nice to see them spli...
Read more

Greatest Hits:: TraxX: Oh! My Goddess

-
Image
 Yes, this is the name that the group turned into, but when the song was released, they were just going by "TRAX", which is how I'm going to refer to them throughout this post. The only reason I know that this band exists is because of the band 20th Century Boys, because one of them  started out as a member of TRAX. So this is going to be interesting because I haven't heard of any of their songs. Got this suggestion from someone sending me a message on Tumblr, which was a delight because the band is older than almost every new idol that has debuted in the last two years. Not all of them, but most of them, and it makes me happy to run into a fan of an older group and also for introducing me and a lot of other people to this band. I am very much looking forward to this. So TRAX is a band that debuted under SM back in 2004, and they've had a bit of a tumultuous history. This song is the title track of their second mini album after they went down to two. Released in 2...
Read more

Song Review:: EXO: REVERXE- Crown

-
Image
Release date: 2026 January 19 Album tracklist: Crown , Back It Up, Crazy, Suffocate, Moonlight Shadows, Back Pocket, Touch & Go, Flatline, I'm Home Album runtime: 28 minutes  My first comeback with EXO coinciding with their first comeback is a delightful happenstance, and I'm excited to be here with the EXO-Ls for this. I'm so beyond frustrated with SM over this whole situation, but until SM decides to be completely nonsensical, I'm going to treat this as a simple hiatus for them from the group. They'll come back. And the average is over three minutes, so I am so, so happy. One of the more interesting things about the instrumental is that there are sirens going on through almost the entire thing, but they’re subtle enough that the song isn’t taken over by them and you’re unlikely to be jump-scared by them while you’re driving. But they’re there and they add a strong flavor to the song, which is otherwise majority a beat and rhythm, rather than having much of a m...
Read more