Just A Little Fangirl Love

 And here's our closer to the b-side month I decided to do. You know what's kind of funny? The first songs I reviewed are about to become eligible for Greatest Hits posts. Some of them are practically those posts in length already, so it would be interesting to see what I do with them now, especially now that I've had time to sit with some of them and performances have had time to happen. In the meantime, we've got a song that comes with mcuh recommendation from the K-Pop community at large and kind of a perfect way to bridge what I've been doing with July and the events that are going to happen in August. Because this kind of is an event on its own, but it's also a b-side by an artist I haven't covered. Win-win. Best of both worlds. Perfect bridge. And it has a bridge, which is a throwback to May. WJSN, also known as Cosmic Girls, debuted as a twelve-member group under Starship Entertainment back in 2016. I've actually got a pretty big soft spot for thi...

  I'm getting closer to being caught up.  The links down in the chart, as always, go to my reviews I've written for the songs. Show Champion: Hearts2Hearts "Lemon Tang" MCountdown: LE SSERAFIM + ILLIT + KATSEYE "ICONIC BY MISTAKE" Music Bank: ATEEZ "BAD" Show! Music Core: aespa "LEMONADE" Inkigayo: I.O.I "Suddenly" ASC Performance: N/A The Show: RESCENE "Pretty Girl" The Extra Stage: BABYMONSTER "I LIKE IT"

Release date: 2026 July 19 Album tracklist:  I made a mistake , I made a mistake - instrumental Album runtime: 8 minutes  We just got DK and Vernon's military enlistment announcement. I have to do something to take my mind off it, even though logically I know the sooner they leave, the sooner they come back, and so far I'm 2/2 in my prediction that they'd be enlisting after Dino debuted. I'm also happy to note that the big worry I had, that they'd have to do birthday lives separately, is not a concern because if the math is mathing correctly, DK should get back in March and Vernon in May. So I'm going to hope that V.O.S, as a first gen group very removed from all of that, can distract me. It's a tall order, but if anyone can, it's first gen vocals. I may have made a miscalculation, looking at the title of the song, but it's fine. We've got my beloved strings and the guitar is soft, beautiful, and non-obtrusive, even when it's more noticeably ...

Release date: 2026 July 21 Album tracklist: Stagefright , 8PM Album runtime: 5 minutes  I'm so excited that they're coming back to my city. They put on a pretty good concert, even with how small that venue was, and I like a lot of their music. EXCEL is still my favorite song of theirs, but even then, they've released a few other songs I like nearly as well. I'm just happy that they're still active. I really am. There is a specific level of sultry drama in the instrumental. While the instrumental has the slow beat that lets the ong have a little bit of an inherent weight, the actual instruments being used are largely light and high. The instrumental uses the heavy weight of a lone percussion as punctuation for the song instead of letting the ong ahve a swagger weight through the whole thing. I imagine that we're going to get some very smooth choreography with this song. I also mostly love how the instrumental falls out from underneath the rapping to let him stan...

 Two big powerhouse vocalists back to back. Nice. We're continuing with July's "I'm doing b-sides by artists that I haven't covered yet" theme, I suppose you could call it. I've had a few months of writing a lot of Greatest Hits posts for the Expanded Offerings, so I thought I'd forcibly balance that out a bit to compensate for that a little and for what will be happening in the short term that I know about. Which isn't a lot because I keep changing my mind about exactly what songs I'm going to do although the topic has been fairly stable once I decide it. Next month is "Events". For the record. With a tiny three post arc in the middle that's slightly unrelated. That mini arc is the only one that's one hundred percent locked though.  Ailee debuted in 2012 as a soloist, which makes her one of my beloved 2012 debuts, and congrats to her because she got married in 2024! I wish her a long and happy life with her husband. And you w...

Release date: 2026 July 24 Album tracklist: Summer Night 2026 , Summer Night 2026 - Instrumental Album runtime: 3 minutes  Okay. So. I'm sure you're all aware that I try to pay specific attention to the first Gen groups when they drop new music. And this isn't technically new music in the way we might think, but it is a new edition, so to speak, from their 2017 song. Oh, and they're a co-ed group. We need the co-ed groups to stay active because there are so few of them. Ah, listen to that saxophone at the beginning. I wish it lingered a little bit more throughout the song, but it pops up enough that I'm okay with it not being present throughout. Funnily enough, when the saxophone isn't around, it sounds like video game menu music for something that's brightly colored with cute animals. It's kind of Viva Pinata, you know? The saxophone ages it up a little and turns it into easy listening, and it's really nice, and then it goes back to the menu music. ...

Release date: 2026 July 08 Album tracklist:  Pretty Girl Album runtime: 3 minutes  We are on Underage Protocol for this group until November, so they're so close to being taken off the list. Also, congrats on the win! Edit: Also, this is actually a remake of a KARA song, which I just discovered. It did not take long for me to add this song to the playlist I keep to keep track of which song get released this year that I really enjoy. There's a bright intensity to the instrumental that is slow enough that it doesn't feel aggressive or frenetic. Most of this is due to the electric guitar and the drums being as steady and present as they are, and honestly, even though there isn't a lot of variation going on in the instrumental, it's not gratingly repetitive in a way that makes me twitchy, which is a good thing. I'm loving the rock. I wish that there was either a big uptick in energy or a very soft downturn, but what's here is still good. What flow in energy that...

Release date: 2026 August 03 Album tracklist: ZZAN, Party Rock Rock (prod. Hitchhiker) , Sincerely (prod. Lee Hyun Do of DEUX) , Micheo Micheo , Love Sick (narr. Lee Moon Sae) , For JEONG and LOVE, LIKE IT Album runtime: 20 minutes  I genuinely don't even know how to title this. Congrats, Dino! And also, congrats to one of possibly the most successful inside jokes to come out of any group! It's a bit odd, but at the same time, knowing Seventeen, Dino debuting as his old man character before he debuts as Dino properly (listen to Wait , y'all) is very on brand for them. The "S" in SVT stands for "strange." Ah, drama. Ah, saxophone. This instrumental is a hot cup of chowder on a cold day. I'm struggling so hard to not actually listen to his voice here for this section. I hope you all appreciate the effort. But that saxophone, y'all. I'm a little surprised at the audio balancing, because there are a couple of spots where the instrumental almost o...

Release date: 2026 July 21 Album tracklist: ETERNAL, Vitamin ME , Pocket Treat, Blue Heart, Screen Time, Teacher, Cold Blood, Why do I cry?, Day 1, Wonderland Album runtime: 29 minutes  Y'all are probably going to get sick of me saying that I don't care that they left Pledis, that they were at Pledis, which means I will continue to love and support my girls. But I am nothing if not loyal and it takes very little to trigger my sense of loyalty at all. Also, the title track is over three minutes long. I told you I loved them. We've got a very Latin summer sound going on for this, which is perfect for a July release. This is fun. There's a little bit of a cowbell in places and the Spanish guitar is a lovely combination I wasn't expecting. This is so laid-back and chill even though there's a little bit of a disco energy going on with the strings. It's very pretty, and almost a little flirtatious. I love their voices, and we get a beautiful belt that leads into t...

Release date: 2026 May 19 Album tracklist: Ghost Rider, OKay , Graffiti, Trophy, Outsider Album runtime: 14 minutes  I'd been thinking about doing this when the video came out, but then I didn't do it and forgot it as I do most things. I have the memory of a sieve but I never know what's going to fall through and what's going to stick. And these are my kids! This was my first rookie group! And they're one of my March debuts, so of course I'm going to shout about the kids (I recognize that they're all adults, but they'll be the kids until they get their own younger sibling group) to anyone who will listen and into the Void if I must about how amazing they are live. The music is good. The performances are better. Spray can sound effects are fun. It's been a hot minute since we got a song with that, ignoring the fact that this is a b-side and not a title track, but I won't say anything if you won't. I love how we get softer songs for their b-sid...

 We're apparently having a slightly controversial little month. It's fine. You can't do anything in any industry without running into a scandal or two because people are people, and people are flawed. Not that she did anything wrong because she didn't. However, I added her to the Roulette Wheel candidates because she's released so many OSTs that I absolutely adore and because I, and probably many others, know her best from the song she did with Taec because of how many of the idols have covered that song, which was released a couple of years after she released this album. Baek Z Young debuted in 1999 as a soloist and she is now wonderfully married with a daughter. Good for her. Genuinely love that for her. Also, I just need everyone to know that she has a song called "Sad Salsa" and if this weren't b-side month, I'd be doing that because color me intrigued. Also, I found out that she was one of the performers in Pyongyang, North Korea in 2018. She...

Release date: 2026 July 20 Album tracklist:  Time's Tickin' , An Ordinary Story Album runtime: 7 minutes  I've actually already seen the music video because I let YouTube just play music videos for about an hour and this was one of them. Also, I was mildly surprised to see him so active on Weverse this last weekend, but when I saw he'd dropped a new song, it suddenly all made sense. Those two usually aren't very active unless they've got something going on. During SM Town last year, Changmin was commenting on posts for about five minutes right before TVXQ! was performing. Literally stopped as the group ahead of them finished. This song is oddly clangy, and it sounds like there's a cowbell involved, which I'm always surprised by, though to be fair, I think it's been several months at minimum since the last time I heard a cowbell, or something that sounds like one in a song I was reviewing. Everything else going on in the song is oddly dramatic in a wa...

Release date: 2026 July 21 Album tracklist: Answer, Don't Wake Me Up! , Can't Get Enough, Summer Blue, Down, Test Drive, Promises (feat. BrotherSu) Album runtime: 20 minutes So I don't get insanely behind, I try to do at least one July release a day right now. I've been not doing so well with this goal, but here we are. I have jumped both times that I've hit play on this song. That's such an aggressive start. We've got a strong dance tack for the instrumental with a skittering beat that drives the song like a war chariot. Underneath the skittering is a heavy bass drum of some sort and a grungy electric guitar. This honestly feels very movie soundtrack, but it has to be a movie like Rocky . There needs to be high intensity with the action.  Vocally, this reminds me a bit of the Twilight soundtrack, which is strange for two reasons that are closely related but not the same thing in my head: 1) I cannot actively recall any of the songs from that soundtrack and ...

Release date: 2026 May 04 Album tracklist: MOON , CHOOM , I LIKE IT , LOCKED IN Album runtime: 12 minutes  Am I doing a b-side instead of any of the title tracks I'm supposed to be doing? Yes. But, I picked this song for an extra stage on one of the Music Show Wins posts, which meant I was forcing myself to review this. However. I've got a good feeling about this song (I can't watch their stage because they didn't win, but I've got a good feeling about it). You know what? I spent most of the instrumental waiting for something very specific to come out of this instrumental because it's registering as country music in my head. I finally got it for a bit during the bridge, and honestly the instrumental is so bright and festival-like that  it's reminding me of a song I covered for the Expanded Offereings, but because we're on Underage Protocol, I don't dark risk taking the time to figure out which one it is because the odds are very high that this song w...

 I'm back to being in the correct month! I'll be caught up by August and then we can get back to my normal commentary. As always, the links down in the chart go to my reviews. Show Champion: N/A MCountdown: Hearts2Hearts "Lemon Tang" Music Bank: ATEEZ "BAD" Show! Music Core: I.O.I "Suddenly" Inkigayo: N/A ASC Performance: N/A The Show:  N/A The Extra Stage: izna "METRONOME"

  First wins for songs this week! Whoo! As always, links in the spreadsheets go to my reviews! Enjoy! Show Champion: RIIZE "Do your dance" MCountdown: LE SSERAFIM + ILLIT + KATSETE "ICONIC BY MISTAKE" Music Bank: RIIZE "Do your dance" Show! Music Core: I.O.I "Suddenly" Inkigayo: N/A ASC Performance:  N/A The Show:  N/A The Extra Stage: EPEX "ECHO"

Release date: 2026 July 06 Album tracklist: CHEESE , SEXY BACK Album runtime: 5 minutes  Not even five minutes for the single. It's fine. I'm fine. The title track is almost acceptable, but overall? What is that? Also, even though vol. 2 is sitting in my notebook waiting for me to do it because of how painfully behind I am, I wanted to do at least one review from this month today. So, CHEESE gets that spot. Well done, CHEESE . The electric guitar is being used as punctuation, which I am here for. It's a nice use of the instrument and one we haven't gotten quite this aggressive in a while. The slightly odd rhythm of some of the instruments, especially considering most of them aren't getting a legato set of notes for a melody. We get a lot of chords, which is fun, but it's only the pre-chorus and to a lesser extent the chorus that get a proper melody going on in the instrumental. I like the use of the camera flash sound effect as well as what sounds like a dispos...

Release date: 2026 June 06 Album tracklist:  Ride or Die Japan Version,  Ride or Die , Wake Up Japan Version, Wake Up Album runtime: 11 minutes  Okay, everyone. This is a friendly recommendation that YouTube gave me that I then immediately looked up because I didn't recognize the name and wanted to make ure it wasn't an AI group, because there have been a few that YouTube has recommended to me and I have to decline those. I'm here for the human effort and ability with the actual performers. Anyway, they're made up of AWIN, which debuted early in 2024, and APEX, which debuted in 2018. Also one of the members is a Melody (BTOB fan), and fan of my man Hui from Pentagon, and auditioned for Peak Time. The maknae was born in 2001, which means the group is not on Underage Protocol, and I am happy as a clam about this. Okay, electric guitar. Hello there. The Tron vibes are strong with this song, and it's such an anime theme song, which makes sense since they've been pro...

Release date: 2026 March 20 Album tracklist: Body to Body, Hooligan , Aliens, FYA, 2.0 , No. 29, SWIM , Merry Go Round, NORMAL , Like Animals, they don't know 'bout us, One More Night, Please, Into the Sun, Come Over Album runtime: 41 minutes  I don't know if they also dropped a music video for Come Over, but here we are, behind, as per usual. I actually love the instrumental for this song, and it's not just because this is an almost four-minute long song, which is wildly rare these days and also an outlier in the album as a whole given that about thirty seconds were removed from each song. It's got a very specific aesthetic that reminds me of Bioshock. Everything about the instrumental sounds vaguely like it was recorded either underwater or through water, using technology from the thirties (which I know isn't the time period for Bioshock, but bear with me). It's wonderful. There's a bit of a melody to accompany the beat that has this haunting weakness ...

 This song right here is literally older than half of Stray Kids and half of ATEEZ and the entirety of TOMORROW X TOGETHER. We're going back, y'all. Which is funny because there's another first gen song lurking in my roulette wheel that's older than all of BTS except for two. So, for those of you who were born after this group disbanded, and never got the chance to listen to them, and for those of you who came to K-Pop after they disbanded and never got the chance to listen to them, well, now's your chance to discover them! We do have some of the lineup changes that make first gen K-Pop distinct, instead of just the music, but it could have been a lot wilder with those changes. And the group had a few controversies while they were active, but it seems like they and Baby V.O.X are more or less cool with each other now. DIVA debuted in 1997 as a three-member group under Cream Records, possibly. I did look, but I'm getting conflicting information from a couple of ...

Release date: 2026 May 28 Album tracklist: Y2K , LBD, THIS ISLOVE (Kor ver.), THIS IS LOVE (Eng ver.), Y2K (Sped up ver.), Y2K (Instrumental), LBD (Instrumental) Album runtime: 20 minutes  How late am I? Almost two months late with this, actually. But, this was sitting waiting to be done in my notebook I've designated for writing my reviews because I just really enjoy writing by hand, a lot more than typing. This song is making my joints ache in a very specific birth-year-starts-with-a-one sort of way. The sound of the phone dialing at the beginning is bringing back some memories I was not expecting to have such visceral flashback to. You never hear that sound anymore. And the sound of the dial-up modem? Even more stress. Interestingly, the instrumental itself doesn't really sound like an instrumental from around 2000. This isn't loud enough. The chanting right before the dial up modem sound does in fact sound very 90s however. I just realized that I never double checked ag...

Release date: 2026 July 10 Album tracklist: Vanilla, Ice Cream , Baby Wassup? No More Disco, Fxxking Star, Long Way Long Ride Album runtime: 16 minutes  I don't think I ever did his solo album back in November, but I'm still willing and happy to do it if someone would like to suggest I do it. A simple "Can you review Talk to You by Yeonjun please?" comment on literally any post would do it. You don't need to submit it with The Form , although you can. Also, congrats on the wins! This is apparently just my day to do boy group soloists with the more sensual choreography. I haven't seen his choreography yet, of course, but with the low bass and the grinding instrumental, I can guess what it's going to be. There are a couple of spots where we get a little more variation to the instrumental than I expected, when we've got a spot right in the middle where most of the instrumental gets stripped out and then the grungy guitar  gets more prominent again. That s...

Release date: 2026 July 15 Album tracklist:  Icy & Spicy , KO, KO (Rush ver) Album runtime: 8 minutes  I've already gotten a slight spoiler of this. Everyone, be prepared for muscles on display. Funny thing about this is, my mom mentioned to me a bit ago that he said he'd been dieting since May. I said, "He's releasing something soon." The next day: announcement. My mother and I discuss K-Pop often as one of our shared interests along with D&D, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ASOIF, etc.  Minhyuk. This song is too short. This man really likes his brass instruments, doesn't he? I'd be a lot happier if we got more of that, but being placed where it is in the song (intro and chorus) is a good second. Otherwise, most of the song is taken up by a very strong dance beat that is likely to have a lot of body rolls and strutting of some sort. This is not one of his soft and sentimental song' this is one of his swaggery songs that's truly Huta, not BTOB...

Release date: 2026 July 04 Album tracklist: The road that shaped me , The road that shaped me - instrumental Album runtime: 6 minutes  The process that led me to discovering this group is as follows: for July in my Expanded Offerings, I'm only doing Battle of the B-Sides posts by artists I haven't yet covered there, so I was looking for some soloists to add to the Roulette Wheel I'm using. I looked up one (Son Yeji, or as I had to find her, 손 예지) and she has a song called "Ghost" which I decided to listen to even though it's a title track and thus can't do it this month, but I was curious about it for October potentiality. In my queue, I saw a song by something called "MOVNING" and I liked the title of the song. Turns out MOVNING is a band and this came out this month. SO I'm going to pause what I was doing to cover this. That piano. The piano i the reason I looked up the band because I was really hoping this was a real song and not an AI art...

Release date: 2026 July 13 Album tracklist: Promise , SOLOVE, Bad Name (sung by Leeteuk), GODOGNAM (sung by Heechul), ONSAGMIRO, More Than Love Album runtime: 21 minutes  I love it when yearlings get their own subunits (looking at you, 90TAN). This one, I think, has been at least a decade in the making, although to be fair, I'm not super familiar with Super Junior dynamics other than their rather infamous fights they used to have back in the day. Still, I'm excited about this one and very curious to see what these two will give us. I'm always curious when the second gen idols do something. The instrumental sounds like either a children's nature show theme song or a really cheesy sitcom theme song from the 70s or 80s. It's fitting considering they're doing their subunit because they're the same age and they were born during the 80s, but it's just kind of amusing. The brightness of this instrumental is almost blinding in the most summery lemon-yellow kind ...