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Halloween Spookening: 2024 Edition

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 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...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: Candy Shop: Candy#

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 I decided to spend some time this month on artists I haven't covered yet, which includes some younger and some older artists, and also on b-sides, because I've given a lot of attention to the title tracks the last couple of months and realistically, there are a lot more b-sides than there are title tracks floating out in the big wide world of music. People pay more attention to the title tracks for understandable reasons, but I really like the b-sides and they're a different side of groups than you get from the title tracks, you know? So, Candy Shop is a five-member girl group that debuted in 2024 under Brave Entertainment. One of the members is currently on hiatus, and I did review the last song they released, which was March of 2025, right after the maknae turned seventeen. So, as of this year, with the maknae eighteen years old, they're no longer on Underage Protocol for debuting with most of the group underage at debut, which means I get to sniff my way through th...
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Song Review:: NAZE: NAZE- People Talk {Debut}

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

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 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...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: RAINZ- Music up

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 Next up from the Roulette Wheel that I made of songs I could theoretically cover this month, we have a Produce 101 S2 era project group. I'm not going to turn this into a NU'EST adjacent post, so insert the applicable connections as though I've already said them. Now, that being said, one of my favorite things that happens post-survival shows, especially the big ones that are backed by the major broadcasting companies, is the number of smaller project groups that pop up made up of former participants. They don't usually last much longer than the debuting group from the show, but they're usually a very interesting composition of the trainees. AB6IX could be considered such a group, for instance.  RAINZ debuted in October of 2017 and disbanded in October of 2018 as a seven-member group, all of whom have debuted as soloists since then and two of which debuted in other groups later. The majority of the members of RAINZ were between ranks 31 and 62 when they were elimin...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: Pentagon: When I Was In Love

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 Continuing with my July theme of "B-Sides From Artists I Haven't Covered Yet", I've only actually decided on the first three songs. I've got a doc that has a list of songs I kind of want to cover but am horribly indecisive about because I've switched July's setlist about four times now before I gave up. The doc is going to be a roulette wheel when it's time. So, if you've got a song for me, I've got a lot of room in the back two-thirds of the month for it and am happy to slot it right in there. The other solidified song is from an artist who is actually a pretty controversial figure, but also undeniably impactful on K-Pop as a whole.  Pentagon debuted in 2016 under Cube Entertainment as a ten-member boy group. They're currently down to at most nine members, but until we get a comeback from them to clarify, I'm not sure exactly how many we have left. But they're not disbanded! And a lot of their songs were written by the members (ma...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: Teen Top: Tell me why

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 I've got a doc that I've been adding songs to and removing from for the last couple of weeks of potential songs to cover for the rest of July. Before I tossed that list into a roulette wheel, I took a look at some of the groups I've got in my To Do playlist and added a couple more b-sides for groups in there that I hadn't covered yet. This song was actually one of them, so Teen Top apparently wanted to be covered, and they wanted to be covered now. Which is fine, you know?  Teen Top debuted as a six-member group under TOP Media (which was founded by two members of my second favorite first gen group and also has my kids ODD YOUTH) in 2010 when the maknae was fourteen. I expect better of idols-turned-CEOs. I really do. But apparently the reason why Teen Top wanted to be covered right now is because their sixteenth anniversary is right now, so happy birthday, Teen Top! Their former leader left the group because he didn't feel like he fit the idol standards (I'll f...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: G-Dragon (BIGBANG): A Boy

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 Back when I was trying to fully plan out July, foolish creature that I am, I wanted a big name to help balance out what was, at the time, a lot of smaller groups and artists. And, love them or hate them, BIGBANG is one of the biggest names you can do in the world of K-Pop, and they have been for at least fifteen years. But I didn't want to do one of the group songs yet because my instinct tells me that if I'm going to do a BIGBANG song, that's going to be an event. So I planned an event that will be coming up somewhat soon. I also recognize that of the Big 3, SM is definitely overrepresented and I hadn't done anything YG yet (you may remember that I did CL last month, but I decided on her after I'd decided on BIGBANG for the YG representation) (interestingly, I technically had done something YG related much, much earlier, because YG the Dude was part of Seotaiji and Boys, and I have covered a Seotaiji song ). Instead, I asked my friend who has been listening to K-P...
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Battle of the B-Sides:: DIVA: Feel it

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

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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...
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