Welcome to my K-Pop review blog! Kick up your feet! Relax a moment! Find a new favorite song or remember an old favorite. And remember, you can't spell NU'EST without LOVE.
Release date: 2025 July 8 Album tracklist: Express Mode , Haircut, Air, Delight, I Know, Say Less, D.N.A, Finale, Stuck With You Album runtime: 28 minutes Average runtime of over three minutes, which is aided by the four minute song, but there are only two that are under three minutes. This is all good. Congrats on your almost 20th anniversary, SuJu! The fun thing about this group is that the group and me almost share a birthday. Just as a fun fact, The Incredibles movie is almost exactly one year older than the group. The introduction of this song is one of the funniest things I've heard in a while. Oh, my gosh. I thought I'd accidentally hit a radio somehow. Ah, we've got a skittering beat. Good stuff. I'm a little amused that for what I'm assuming is their 20th anniversary album, they went more hip-hop than they normally go, but you know what? The second gen groups adapting to the times is a good sign. They are keeping it in the family, though, because it...
Well, friends, as this is a new debut (or near enough), I need to take a look at the ages and verify that what I heard was correct. And it was! The maknae, Donghyeon, turns eighteen in a couple of months, so if I like the sound, I can like the group. Four of the seven were contestants on Loud , which also produced TNX (THE NEW SIX) back in 2021, including the maknae, so I'm honestly grateful that they took so long to debut because Donghyeon would have have been fourteen. Three more years of training? I have tentatively high hopes for the group, as well as the fact that a lot of other people (including my Stay friend whose judgement I trust) are talking about this song. She actually brought the song up just as I was sitting down to write this after I finished reading my book. They'll be officially debuting later this month on the 20th. So, let's see what the buzz is about. I'll add the info when the debut happens, and I link everything. The runtime. Why. Ooh, we've...
Release date: 2025 February 04 Album tracklist: Smoke Point, Graffiti , GIMME GIMME , Kings & Queens, Freaky Fresh Album runtime: 12 minutes I am aware that this group exists. I know they're a fairly recent boy group, but have no idea their company, the number of members, or debut year, and I do have two of their songs in one of my playlists, but they're my Junk Drawer playlist and haven't gotten to them yet. Ah! Seven member group under Eden Entertainment (which is now sort of a subsidiary of JYPE, I think?) that just had their one year anniversary. And because they're a recent debut, I have to check the ages, but they pass! As of December, they're all eighteen or older. So, if I like the song, I can add it to the playlists! Nice! This song has a lot going on. I don't know why I'm getting strong tropical vibes with clanging metal, which sounds a little like an oxymoron as the associations with clanging metal are more industrial and the ones with jung...
Release date: 2025 October 27 Album tracklist: Legacy, Beat-Boxer , I'm Him , Co-Star, Next To Me Album runtime: 14 minutes There are a whole lot of pre-releases that have all dropped at the same time, belonging to albums that are not all dropping on the same day. Fascinating. Also, that means that you all have lots to look forward to. Happily, the maknae is eighteen as of a couple of weeks ago. Happy birthday, Yuki! Also, this album looks like it's going to be longer than the last one I covered, so I am very happy about that one. Title track is questionably short, but this one is within acceptable limits. My only question here is if that sound at the beginning of the music video is in the actual audio track or not. If it's not, I'm sad. The general thing the instrumental is doing is interesting, and I kinda vibe with it because there are textures to the song and I really like that. However, the opening sound? I was catapulted back to childhood with the similarity to ...
Release date: 2024 October 16 Album tracklist: remembrance c andy , trampoline, Bluerose, BTTB (Back to the Basics), shame, dream diary ~ etching mémoires of midnight rêverie Album runtime: 20 minutes I'm aware of one of the members of the group by name and know she and one of the other members came off hiatus earlier in the year. I'm always relieved when a member on hiatus for whatever reason becomes active again, and I hope she is doing well. I also believe this is the first full group album in a while, so that's also an exciting moment. I'm also aware of the recent controversy of the use of AI in promotional/album artwork for this album, or this particular single. I'm not entirely sure. I also do not condone the use of generative AI in artwork. But that's something to be aware of. Audience participation snapping? Be still, my soul. There are a couple of sections where you could actually have audience participation clapping as well, which ...
Happy anniversary, BIGBANG!! I am so late with this, but I was not going to skip this because it's the big 2-0 and I would have to make an entire other post to talk about why BIGBANG requires acknowledgement as one of the biggest playmakers in shaping what K-Pop became. I find it amusingly fitting that their company was founded by a member of the boy group generally acknowledged to be the first K-Pop group: SeoTaiji and Boys. Also, fun fact, I went to a cupsleeve event yesterday (as of writing this paragraph) for their anniversary and I really liked that they included TOP in the design, even if he was on one side and the three current members were on the other. Some related bookkeeping first though. There is a prison-striped elephant in the room with this group. If you are OT5 for this group, you may want to skip this post. If I acknowledge him, it will be with begrudging frustration and a curled lip, and only if I have no choice. I'd be lying if I said his immoral choices and...
If you haven't heard the news, The Show is set to be canceled in the first half of November, which is infuriating. The Show , while probably the least frequently occurring of the music shows, was the one that the younger/less well-known groups had the best shot of getting wins on, especially that all important first win. And, related to that, it appears that After School Club may also have been canceled. It's listed as a previous show on the website, and I cannot begin to express my displeasure in this. Again, this was a good space for the rookies and the smaller groups to start. Some groups that got very big eventually started out as rookies or young, struggling groups on ASC (BTS, Seventeen, and Stray Kids, to name a few), and it filled a niche for those groups to have more much-needed exposure. Hopefully, we get something to replace the shows, especially since I think they were on the same broadcasting network. Okay. Bad news over. Good news. NMIXX. Almost a clean swe...
The final song of my little triptych of Sober songs to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of BIGBANG's debut, and I went with a contemporary soloist. Girls' Generation is only a year younger than BIGBANG and occupies much the same role as BIGBANG does in the canon, just on the girl group side. So it really worked out that there is a soloist from Girls' Generation that has a song with the same name as Sober because that also gives us a different texture to look at. Plus, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the impact Girls' Generation and its members have had on the industry cannot be hyped enough, especially when their activity has slowed down a little and I've seen younger or newer fans mistakenly dismiss them just because they're not pulling the streaming or release numbers like the streaming farms for some of the other groups. But that's why I do the research and hand y'all the results: to make the context around the last 30...
Release date: 2024 March 05 Album tracklist: Falling Slowly , Light Album runtime: 7 minutes Ah, a proper song length. I'm writing this before the frantic rush of the next few days in terms of releases, because competition there will be fierce. And also to start to pad out the March releases because somebody had to get a win on a music show months later. I joke. I'm actually very happy for them. And I picked this one because I scrolled randomly, and his was the one my cursor was on when I stopped. I feel like Daesung needs very little introduction. He is the maknae of BIGBANG after all. The instrumentals for this song are absolutely gorgeous with a lovely acoustic guitar that gets to spend time at the front of the song, before it hands over the reigns to an electric for very strategic sections. But seriously, that beginning is one of the most soothing things. There's a sense of the bittersweet to it, because at no point is there a strong bass driving the song, and the ho...
Someone looked at one of my posts using a Linux operating system in the last week. Wow. My eyebrows are raised and I'm a little bit delighted by that. Hello, Linux user. I don't know if you'll see this, but I'm giving you a thumbs up. Hello, everyone else! Welcome, Champions! I know I'm wildly behind with the plan for September, given that it's almost halfway through and I'm only now getting to those posts, so I'll have to move one of my planned August posts to November and one of my originally planned September songs to December. You will get that first gen song this year. September is going to be reserved for the smaller groups. We had big moments in August, and now we're going to get a little bit of a quieter month with smaller groups. Well, metaphorically because this was a nine-member group. Mostly. Sort of. Hence the name. Kind of what it says on the tin. 9MUSES debuted in 2010 under Star Empire as a nine-member group. Again, hence the name. T...
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