Song Review:: Stray Kids: THIS & THAT

-

  • Release date: 2026 August 07
  • Album tracklist: RUN IT, THIS & THAT, After You, FARMING, I Do, Way Out, Back Then, This & That - (Festival Version)
  • Album runtime: 25 minutes

 Look at all the capital letters. I know that you all can't see my handwriting because you're reading it on a screen and not in the notebook I first wrote this review in, but yikes. Ooh, maybe that's what I'll do as part of the year-end wrap-up: I'll take some pictures of these reviews and post them. I have no idea if anyone will care, but I like behind the scenes stuff so maybe someone else will too. Anyway, happy birthday, Changbin! You're the big 2-7, so enjoy your twenties while they last! It's interesting that THIS & THAT and RUN IT are tied for streams right now. Also, I'd like to point out the run time. That's right. This is the first album I've reviewed in a while where not only is the title track over three minutes long, but so is the average runtime of the entire album. Thank you, 3RACHA.

We have a return to the industrial clang that marks so many of their early title tracks that caused their songs to be labeled "noise music." I think there may also be an actual engine rev at the "vroom vroom" part, which I'm delighted to be hearing. I'm sure I'll warm to the song overall, because the beat is fascinating and it has a lot of interesting sound layers to it. It's just not what I'm feeling right now.

I had a pretty good run with really enjoying their title tracks for a bit. This one falls into the mumbled monotone that I'm pretty sure people are supposed to read as cool and effortless, but really does not for me, though Seungmin's and Lee Know's parts (even though Lee Know has another chorus, so go figure, it doesn't make sense to me either) there at the end are a breath of fresh air for the song that is desperately needed. However, the song as a whole, despite how aggressively catchy it is, is far too repetitive for me and my taste. That being said, I literally can't help myself from repeating the "This and that" part. But I'm also fairly certain that this won't be a "listen on repeat for hours on end" kind of song.

I was not at all distracted by Chan and Hyunjin's biceps. Or Changbin's open shirt. It's fine. There's obviously a storyline going on here, but I'm not up to speed on the Lore with these guys. But my storytelling senses are tingling. It's just not obvious enough that I can take a confident guess without knowing the lore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Music Show Wins:: Week of 07/08 - 07/14

-
Image
  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"
Read more

Battle of the B-Sides:: WJSN: Pantomime

-
Image
 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...
Read more

Song Review:: NAZE: NAZE- People Talk {Debut}

-
Image
Release date: 2026 May 04 Album tracklist:  Pretty Pink Socks , People Talk , Awesome, Seoul Album runtime: 12 minutes  I'm suddenly having deja vu, like I've already looked these guys up. Was it this group? Was it a different one? Well, regardless, these guys took a bit of the ol' ASTRO route and technically debuted as actors first in a drama and used that to introduce themselves. And I believe that they would have been CIX's younger brothers, if CIX hadn't recently been disbanded, and yes, I am totally fine about that. Why wouldn't I be? Disbanding right before military service. It's fine. Technically they're the grand-dongsaengs because of EPEX, so EPEX are the ones getting younger brothers. Anyway, I wish NAZE all the luck in the world. And their maknae is already eighteen, so we don't need to put them on Underage Protocol. Interesting choice for a debut song. I feel like more companies are debuting with a little bit more of a sultry, yearning so...
Read more

Halloween Spookening: 2024 Edition

-
Image
 I love Halloween. It's been my favorite holiday for literally my entire life. I have loved Halloween longer than Sangyeon of The Boyz has been alive, barely because my first Halloween was a couple of days before he was born, but according to my mother, even at the age of not-quite one years old, I have loved it. She dressed me up as a San Francisco 49ers cheerleader. I have pictures.  One of the most important things, then, is finding music that matches the Month of Spookening and horror. I love spooky movies. I love spooky books. I love spooky video games (even though I am a wuss of the nth degree and prefer to watch other people play them). And I love spooky music. THUS, this post is simply going to be a compilation of some of the songs I've added to my Halloween K-Pop playlist. If I were to add all of the songs in there, this post would be ages  long. So I'm only going to add as many as I feel like it. I don't know how long this is going to be. But there will be vib...
Read more

Song Review:: Bijou: Summer Night 2026

-
Image
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. ...
Read more

Song Review:: 8TURN: 8.X- Stagefright

-
Image
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...
Read more

Song Review:: Plave: Caligo Pt. 1- Dash

-
Image
Release date: 2025 February 03 Album tracklist: Chroma Drift, Dash , RIZZ, Island, 12:32 (A to T) Album runtime: 17 minutes  I wasn't originally going to do a review for this group because I don't know where to put them in my mental classifications (I had to work really hard as a kid to learn that animation = not real because I believed literally everything was real until I was about seven, which also coincided with my realization that I couldn't actually visit Jurassic Park, so I struggle with the idea of a virtual group in general), but because this song got a win on a music show, I kind of have to for the pattern I've established. So, here we are, although I honestly don't mind being forced to do a review because of my pattern. PLAVE is a virtual group using motion capture that debuted in 2023. And that's all I've got for you on that end. I apologize for the rambling thus far. I'm assuming the real people are all adults for my own sanity, but I also h...
Read more

Battle of the B-Sides:: f(x): Shadow

-
Image
 I love when I get suggestions for groups that I've heard of but haven't actively listened to. I know that f(x) has several songs that are on the list of K-Pop influential songs that pretty much everyone should be familiar with, if they don't know  them. I don't think this is one of them, because this is a b-side, but I could also be wrong. Which is why I like being able to dig into the albums and the songs a little bit. So, this comes from their second studio album Pink Tape, released in 2013, which won a bonsaeng in 2014 at the GDAs, and hit number 1 on multiple music charts worldwide. One of the songs on the album was originally supposed to be Ariana Grande's song, and f(x) got it instead. So that's pretty cool. It's the second track on the album and is described as creepy pop, which I am down for entirely and that was one of the reasons why this song was suggested for me to do as the suggestion included the note that I seem to really like eerie or otherw...
Read more

Battle of the B-Sides:: Ailee: Love Recipe

-
Image
 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...
Read more

Music Show Wins:: Week of 09/17 - 09/23

-
Image
  Okay. We're going to start off with a big congrats to the freshly debuted soloists who got wins this week! It's a little amusing to me that we have two SM winners. But congrats to everyone involved! Also, holy wow Dayoung is pretty. For the After School Club re-run while they're still on hiatus, I actually picked this one before I found out who the The Show winner was, so this was just a happy coincidence. This is ep. 372 from 2019 with WJSN as the guests and Jamie, Heejun, and Woosung from The Rose as the hosts! I couldn't find a good clip of them performing Boogie Up  there so I used their The Show performance instead because those two shows are on the same channel. And as always, the links down in the table go to my reviews, if you have any curiosity there. Enjoy what performances I could give you! Show Champion: aespa "Rich Man" MCountdown: aespa "Rich Man" Music Bank: Haechan (NCT) "CRZY" Show! Music Core: aespa "Rich Man...
Read more