Just A Little Fangirl Love

 Two months down! My apricot tree has started to form the blossom buds which is concerning, but maybe I'll take a picture for the March wrap-up so you can see how pretty it is.  Okay, let's take a look at these debuts, shall we? The groups that I covered were NAVILLERA ,  Daily:Direction . I covered two subunit debuts for QQQ (OnlyOneOf) and NCT JNJM (NCT) . For soloists, I covered Jiwoo (KARD ,  Lee Daeyeol (Golden Child) and Lee Jiham (A.C.E) 's debuts. If I can find a better list of debuts, then I'll include the ones I missed. Songs I was looking forward to:  ATEEZ: I'm deeply curious about where the lore is going to go with this, and also the b-sides because they've got some b-sides that I want tattooed onto my brain Monsta X: I love that they're getting more active again, although I am a little sad that they now have to wait for their maknae to get discharged NOWZ: We've had a streak of songs that I've really liked. I'm okay now if they sw...

 Submission! Submission! Submission! Whoo! I thought this might be a good spot for this, so thank you for your patience! And when I'm finished with this, I'll head over to Threads and send it your way since you wonderfully left a username for me to deliver it to. I actually like ONEWE. And it's funny, after the administrative work and remodeling I did (some of it quite extensive) on almost all of these posts, I'm looking for something that hits my brain to do after this one (since I'd done some planning before I decided I temporarily hated myself). So I'm just listening to my playlists. And other people's playlists. And watching videos on YouTube looking for a sparked song. But I had another ONEWE song come up that caught my attention, and then I remembered that that would be after this one, so I couldn't. As of writing this paragraph, I'm still looking. But I just thought that was kind of funny. ONEWE is a five-member band currently under RBW that r...

Release date: 2026 January 14 Album tracklist: Ferris wheel Album runtime: 7 minutes  Well, well, everyone. Hello! The ever so lovely band ONEWE has dropped a new single! I've enjoyed what I've heard from them so far, though they're not one that I've actively sought out to listen bigger chunks of their discography yet. But I am glad that I went digging through upcoming releases, because I found out that this is actually a pre-release! I love that we get the instrumental for this. The use of the bells makes it sound almost a little Christmassy, but at the same time there's a very festival vibe to that opening. It actually reminds me of when I was little when we lived on the farm, and the neighborhood kids would get to go on sleigh rides because my neighbor two miles down the highway had a gorgeous sleigh his grandfather had made by hand that he'd have his (award-winning) Belgian draft horses pull. So there's a very nostalgic sense to the song for me, but at t...

  With Chuseok well and truly over for the year, we have all the music shows giving us first place winners on their charts! This hasn't happened in over a month! Also, now that triple crowns have been won, I got to share other performances from other groups! We've got four  first song wins, and one of those is a first time win for the group as a whole! Yay! Baksu! And even though those aren't recent performances for the two IVE wins, I shared them anyway because I like having a full set of performances. Also, with After School Club still on hiatus as far as I know, I decided to give y'all a group I've started listening to more because they've got some nice Halloween-y songs: episode 537 with TRI.BE! They spend a lot of time dancing, and not just to their own songs. This was a fun episode. Not that most of them aren't fun, but the vibes are with this group. As always, the links in the chart below go to my reviews of the songs. Show Champion: ONEWE "MAZE...

Release date: 2025 October 07 Album tracklist: Lucky 12, MAZE , UFO, Hide & Seek, Trace, Diary, Beyond the Storm Album runtime: 26 minutes  This is a good week, y'all. But! I will instead focus on the fact that I really like this band, and I'm excited basically anytime that a band drops music. So, here we are. Everything is good. The runtime is phenomenal and brings me joy. Four minute title track.  If this were an idol group, this would have had a dance break. Because this isn't an idol group, instead this gets a guitar solo that, in this day and age, seems ludicrously extravagant, especially with how long it is. The Big Band feel to the entire song has me practically over the moon. Honestly, it has all the pieces that I love, and it's fantastic and amazing and fun. If this ends up being one of those actually sad songs with the super upbeat instrumental, I might cry.  I love the little shortcuts that happen with Koreans speak in English, or sing in this case. On...

  Well, we're getting a little more variation again with the wins, not that I begrudge any of the artists their wins, but I like the variation because it gives me different stages to watch when I share them with y'all. So. Show Champion hasn't updated their playlist with the performances, but if she doesn't have one, I'll grab one from Music Bank . And when I found out about The Show , I'll share that. After School Club is still on hiatus, so I'm giving you episode 386, featuring the band ONEWE. They did some really cool covers while they were there and I thought it was adorable that one of them was promoting ONEUS, which is also fitting considering the two groups have a set of twins split between them (a minute apart, which does make me wonder about how twins work in Korean with the honorifics and such). Show Champion: Yuqi (i-dle) "M.O." MCountdown: aespa "Rich Man" Music Bank: IDID "CHAN-RAN" Show! Music Core: aespa "R...

Release date: 2024 December 23 Album tracklist: We X Mas , Actor Album runtime: 8 minutes Do I need to do a review of the new Christmas single from ONEWE? No. Do I want to? Yes. I really like the band, and this falls under my principle of trying to focus on smaller groups so that they can get more attention. Plus, they're a band, and I've been vocal about my love for bands. There's nothing particularly Christmassy about the instrumentals, or at least nothing that particularly invokes the season. If I weren't looking directly at the name, I'd suspect this to be a regular single. There is a sense of nostalgia, or at least fondness, but it's not necessarily seasonal based on the instrumentals. The guitar solo however is my favorite part. It's nothing that's grand or groundbreaking, but going up the scale like it does reminds me of rock ballads from the 80s. We get that same thing in miniature a couple of other times during the song, which makes it even bett...

Release date: 2024 September 04 Album tracklist:  Off Road , Solar Halo Ring, A piece of You Album runtime: 11 minutes I know nothing about this group other than they and Oneus are close, and I think one of them moved companies to be with the other one. And that information could be wrong. So this should be nice for me to listen to a new (to me) group. Oh! They're a band! Excellent. The crashing of the drums and the cymbals remind me of crashing ocean waves, and I really dig that.. Warm, summer air blowing your hair. The inability to hear anything, let alone this forceful song, because of the windows being down so you can have the breeze in your hair. The screaming of the guitar cutting through the sound of the wind. That is the good life. This song doesn't let up for an instant. Even in moments of relative quiet, you're propelled forward. Even if the instrumentals didn't tell me quite clearly that this is a rock band, their vocals would. They are unmistakably a rock ba...