Battle of the B-Sides:: HOT ISSUE: We Go

 Okay, everyone! Back to my September of groups that deserve more attention because they shouldn't be forgotten! This isn't even the newest group that we're going to be talking about this month because the next one is even younger, but I think they have survived technically longer. I've actually got a couple of HOT ISSUE's songs in one of my playlists already, though this is not one of them. I just decided that I wanted something a lot more upbeat than what I was going to get from S#arp. So. The reality is the group lasted less than a year, which is even worse than the three year average for girl groups. But the song doesn't know that.

HOT ISSUE debuted in 2021 as a seven-member group under S2 Entertainment, a company that was set up by one of the founders of Cube Entertainment, which automatically tells me that this group has some vocals on them. It also makes sense that I found them and added songs to playlists despite their less than a year of official activity, because Cube is one of the companies that I tend to really like the groups from. (It also looks like this group may be yet another one that's been targeted for AI slop on Spotify, which genuinely pisses me off in ways that I don't want to get into because I'm trying to keep this post happy).

We Go is the fifth and final track on their debut album, ISSUE MAKER. The lyricist-only is Kim Kyung (Treasure, WJSN, and Our Home), the composer-only is Bronze (Jay Park, LeeHi, HoneyJ, Yugyeom, pH-1, Sokodomo, WJSN, VANNER, Younite, and U-Know), and the lyricist and composer is Rovin (Wanna One, AKMU, Treasure, Enhypen, Nina, LeeHi, Big Ocean, MOMOLAND, iKON, The Boyz, Sistar, Sechskies, Super Junior, WJSN, Our Home, OH MY GIRL, SE7EN, 1TYM, Tiny-G, and Lee Mujin).

This is the only track of their debut album that I hadn't already added to playlists, which isn't an indication that I don't like it, because when I was trying to decide which song to do of theirs, that was the first time I'd heard this, and I immediately knew that, yes, I wanted to do this one.

This is just a fun song. 

It's also a little ironic that the song is literally described as them saying goodbye to their trainee period and hello to a new welcome world with brightness and energy. The description isn't wrong for the situation at release, but that doesn't stop the contextual irony five years later.

Also, if you think about it, this is kind of a bonkers song. There is so much happening in the instrumental that it would have been a treasure trove for me to do a review for. We've got air raid sirens, a kitchen timer, a crow, bubble pops, and that's just the effects. That's not counting the off-beat rhythm, the plinking, and the skittering. It's slightly unpredictable in the best way.

And I love the combination of the rapping with that aggressively cheerful plinking underneath it, and then the singing of the chorus immediately after it that has air raid sirens. If the song were less fun, those things would have been reversed. Instead, what we get is the friction between the two that works exceptionally well because it has multiple levels of contrasts. 

It's endlessly entertaining to me that the melody of the chorus is in the instrumental behind the rapping, is what I'm trying to say.

I think I'm going to add this to my after work playlist to join Best Friendz by ODD YOUTH and a handful of other aggressively bright and odd songs to help me regulate on my drive home (I voluntarily listen to Aju Nice by Seventeen and Dynamite by BTS and Ring Ding Dong by SHINee, for instance). Like, I had a kid sniff my arm this week by pressing my arm to his nose and mouth and trying to inhale my arm. Sometimes I have to target my nervous system to keep me from taking hours to come down after work because the over-stimulation is real, y'all. And even though a song with so many moving parts seems counter-intuitive to a calm down session, this is unpredictable enough that my brain is happy and that's all I care about.

Much like when I'm scratching my dog's back and abruptly stop, this song just ends. And much like when Chewbacca stares at me and huffs because I have stopped, my response is to wait for the song to start back up again when I have it on repeat, and then I'm happy and content again.

It's going to be fun when this comes on my regular listening playlist and I don't have it on repeat. It's going to upset me when the next song is not this one again, but think about how much happier I'll be once I can go skip back and listen to it again after that mental huff of disappointment. 

Contrasts. I'm telling you, this song is built for them, and I am here for it. It's perfect as a b-side and it's even more perfect that this off-kilter oddity of a song is the last one of the album. I don't know what situations inside the group or the company led to the discussion that led to disbandment, and the group did end up having another single, but this is a shining star of a song that I'm sad never got a chance to be performed. This is either an absolute final song of the encore for a concert, something along the lines of Aju Nice or CALL CALL CALL to send the crowd off nice and hyped as opposed to most other groups that try to send the fans off gently, or it's the second song of a concert. Not the opening song. It doesn't have the correct presence for an opening song. But this song would rev the engines of the concert as a second song (funnily enough, the second song of the album sounds like something MAMAMOO would have released along the same vein as HIP, so there's strong main song energy there even though it wasn't promoted), especially if the choreography leaned into some silliness and whimsy. People at a concert are there to enjoy themselves; why not make it abundantly clear that that is what is going to happen?

And just because I can and the singability of the song feels really high, here's a color-coded video in case you wanted to learn the words. 

Thanks for reading, Champions! We're back on track after the unexpected detour, and I very much hope you enjoyed this song half as much as I did, because that means you would have enjoyed it a great deal indeed. More to the point, this song is so much fun that with the group itself lasting less than a year and this being an unpromoted, unperformed b-side, it doesn't deserve the risk of being completely forgotten in the annals of K-Pop history. 

I'm leaving December largely open for any requests for the end of the year, so unless you've got a time-sensitive one (like a discharge celebration, a birthday, or an anniversary of some sort) or a spooky one for October, that's where it'll be. But I still want your requests. And if you want one to be put out next year at a specific time, I'd love that as well. Drop it in a comment. Throw it at me via The Form. We are here to have fun and celebrate songs. 

Thanks for reading!

Previous: "Survive the Night" by The Boyz                                    Next: "BADVILLAIN" by BADVILLAIN