Song Review:: SLAY: appear

• Release date: 2026 April 02

• Album tracklist: appear

• Album runtime: 3 minutes

 Here is the sequence of events for why I'm covering this song now instead of one of the more recent releases that I need to get to. Changsub (former CUBE artist) dropped a single last week that I just covered. Then, because I did that one, Hui's (also former CUBE artist) popped up as one I should listen to on YouTube. So I started that review. In the middle of it, I decided to look up the writing credits to make sure I was correct about Hui being the writer for his song. Well, I noticed that it was mixed and edited at Cube Studio, so I looked them up because that felt a bit odd, and yes, they do seem to be connected to CUBE. So I commented about the oddity to my Stay friend, who asked who was left at Cube. I started listing artists (Shinwon from Pentagon, i-dle, LIGHTSUM, NOWZ, CLC technically and or possibly). She said "I forgot about LIGHTSUM." And then I panicked a little bit because what if they'd been disbanded and I didn't know? So I went to the company website and it took forever to load, which is where I found out that apparently Pentagon is still at CUBE, which made Shinwon's comment about holding down the fort make more sense (as is LIGHTSUM, but really CUBE needs to do something with them because they haven't released anything as a group since 2024), but then I saw a name I did not recognize underneath NOWZ: SLAY. Which caught my attention, so while I was waiting for that page to load, I reported my findings to my friend with the comment "There is something called 'SLAY' there as well." Finally the page loaded, and I stood there baffled because he's been around a bit, and he was on Peak Time, which I watched, but I do not remember him. And then I see that he released a new single at the beginning of the month. I'm further confused. And now I've looked up the man more generally because who? And it turns out that he's half of a duo called LAS and transferred to Cube this year. And now we're all caught up in case you, like me, looked at this name and went "Who?" So I suppose I'm just doing CUBE affiliated artists right now. Didn't i-dle drop a song recently that I haven't done?

Ooh, he did a Band Live! And the Arirang Live Radio!

 We've got the four instruments that I like to hear: piano, violin, guitar, and drums. I like those four because, like with baking, there's a lot you can do with the basic four ingredients of butter, milk, egg, and flour. In this case, it's got a fairly slow BPM and a softness to it lets the song linger, but there's enough movement and variation to make it seem a lot more energetic than it actually is. And I love how the song starts and ends with the same stretch of piano, though the introduction has the violin included with it, so it's not perfectly symmetrical. It's a very pretty song.

Oh, he's got a voice on him. He's got enough of a voice on him that I'm curious about the rest of his discography. The song is split pretty evenly between the breathier verses and the more opaque chorus, but we've got quite the vibrato layered throughout so that functions as the connective tissue between the different styles he's using. And his ad-libs are so pretty, especially when he starts harmonizing with himself. Ooh, you know who I want him to do a duet with? Woodz. Oh, that would be beautiful. 

You know who he kind of looks like? He kind of looks like Junho from 2PM, just seven years younger. Also, this is gorgeous, so I'm very curious now if he's just like this normally or if this is a one-off.