Song Review:: UNCHILD: We Are UNCHILD- UNCHILD {Debut}

• Release date: 2026 April 21

• Album tracklist: UNCHILD, ENERGY

• Album runtime: 4 minutes

 Well, everyone, we've come to the age of two-minute tracks. Literally. And the title track is better, but still under two-and-a-half minutes. I will say that the group has a pretty cool logo. I'll give them that. But with a freshly debuted group, I have to check. I'm holding out no hope. I have been pleasantly surprised. There are three members (including the maknae) who are seventeen and of those, two are turning eighteen in a few months. Because of that and because the maknae will turn eighteen before their first year is up, I'm not going to put them on Underage Protocol, tentatively. I reserve the right to put them back on if I find out the company is abusive and garbage in the next year. So despite the runtime that makes me frustrated, I hope I like them.

Two things are going to be simultaneously true about this song. I really like the instrumental. The song makes the most for the abysmal runtime with plentiful amounts of variation, a lot more than I was expecting if I'm going to be honest. That guitar carries the song and I love that the instrument with the most screentime, so to speak, gives the song a solid base as well as a melody underpinning the vocals. I'm pleased with what we have. Do I want more? Obviously. Obviously, I want more. But the less than two-and-a-half minutes that the song does not waste the limitations on something that could have been thrown together in five minutes and is so uncomplicated that it renders the entire song dull. It doesn't do that. Thank goodness.

The other thing that's true is that there is a lot of wasted retail space vocally. There are seven members. If we divided the runtime evenly between them, which is unlikely to happen unless the song was written specifically for them, that's a little bit less than twenty seconds a person. Is that fair to a debuting group to only give the group twenty seconds to show off vocal abilities a person? And the other song has even less time for that. But what's even worse is that the song is written like it started off life with a whole extra minute, and then that minute got removed, because there are so many bars of rest where no one is singing. The travesty is that this song sounds unlike just about anything that's come out of a debuting girl group in a while, and I adore this. But you can hear what it should be and it's just unfair to the members. Unless they can't perform a three-minute song, in which case that is a whole separate issue, but I'm not going to accuse the company for failing the group in that way.

Okay, I really kind of love that they included the date and time that this song dropped. This music video is second gen brightly colored, and I love it. Look at the vibrancy. There's a little bit of a storyline going on here, a lot of vibes, but you know what? This is good. This is solid.