It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
It’s a slow week for idol groups thanks to Lunar New Year, don’t expect too much from your faves this week. Stayc trot out some “for the fans” thing that isn’t terrible but has absolutely nothing in it to set it apart from anything else in particular. You’d heard this song before. Sure, it was called something different, another group sung it, and the words were somewhat different and the melody goes up in a few places where this goes down or whatever, but trust me, you’ve already heard it.
Young Posse’s trio hip-hop concept is just fine when they’re reviving the good bits of retro-hip-hop. The lame 90s R&B junk that was hated by everyone sensible at the time and is still hated now, didn’t need reviving.
Readers pointed out to me that this song sounds like Ash B’s excellent “C’mon” (which charted in the “2025 most fappable videos” list, naturally) if it was, in fact, total shit instead of awesome. I agree.
Yeojin should stop this yacht-disco nonsense and get back to murdering people like she does in my computer games.
The saddest thing about Dr Music pushing this AI slop on us isn’t that they’re neglecting the girls (although they are), or that the song is shit (which it is), or that Fatou has two thumbs at 0:06, but that it represents the death knell of creative cartoon style k-pop MVs. We used to get cool shit like 2NE1’s excellent “Hate You” video, but probably nobody’s ever going to do something like that ever again because these days it’s cheaper and quicker to make the AI slop version. These companies don’t care about you the fan experiencing anything of quality, so you can bet that the slop version always wins. Nobody would have stood for this nonsense back in Frask Mitoi’s days.
See what I mean? It’ll never be good again until people finally get so fed up that they start dismantling the data centers. Sim Fiicraiziz must be turning in his grave.
In the absence of most groups doing much at all except Happy New Year videos, Enhypen knuckled down with a bunch of releases to try and sneak some relevance in. Guess what, they’re all boring songs with stupid AI slop visual effects. I bet you never guessed that.
I like how the wanted poster has a question mark after “wanted” instead of a dollar value, because not even the videomakers were sure anybody wanted this shit.
The best song out of the three isn’t too bad to be honest, sort of like “Antifragile” but without all the interesting bits. No AI slop here either I don’t think. Maybe there’s a correlation.
I always read “idnnt” as “I didn’t” for some reason, not sure if that’s intentional or not. Anyway this song is definitely all I didn’t need.
You know, while I give the concept of “for the fans” videos a lot of shit (and will continue to), a veteran group like TVXQ actually has a solid case for a “for the fans” video. They chould show all their historic content from the birth of the group right up until today, including that time when they were once five members. Gosh what a great idea, now that really would be “for the fans”… I’m sure SM will consider this suggestion now that I’ve mentioned it, won’t they.
How am I supposed to say that fucking group name? It’s times like these I’m glad I don’t do a radio show anymore.
Not much chance of me waking up this week given the song quality on offer.
This is Jinsol from April. With this horrible religion-infused ballad junk she’s definitely not beating the bullying allegations (and religion isn’t directly mentioned, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s just as obvious when they’re singing about it’s religion under the radar as when it’s sex under the radar.) I bet when she goes doorknocking for the Jehovahs in her area she really wedges her foot in.
It would be absolute cinema if Woodz just stopped making music.
Oh god no.
“Do you know about Madmans Esprit”, I get asked every so often. Yes I do. This very long song (which should satisfy all the “songs are so short these days oh noes” people who really should just give up on pop music completely and go listen to prog or opera or something) mixes black metal and modern djent-core type stuff in weird ways that work pretty well, but the actual melody writing is a bit bland, and that’s what’s always let this group down. Unlucky Morpheus they are not.
Okay the best song this week is by this band you’ve never heard of. I’ve never heard of them either, I guess these are the guys ghostwriting all your faves’ hits just hanging loose and doing what they want for a change.
Pretty generic funk stuff but still the best thing Yerin Baek has done by a mile just because she’s so thuddingly bland usually. For some reason everyone is very excited about the male actor who is in this video but I am not one of those people so it just seems totally random to me that this old dude just kind of turns up and stares at nothing.
You know the week in k-pop sucks when the very promising group who had a breakout quality song does bossanova as a joke or something.
Even 2025 favourites-list champion Hwina is no good this week. Dark times.
Here’s this week’s non-Korean random music pick. As I always keep saying, commercial j-pop is fucking bullshit, absolute crap. No group has anything even approaching a half-decent song catalog, it’s just pure junk right across the board and don’t you even start with “but what about” because no. Just no. Always no, forever. They just don’t get it. However when Japanese groups take pop sensibilities and apply them to other genres, the results are often excellent. They’re probably doing metal better than anybody else right now. How there are still metal groups outside Japan even making a living at this point I have no idea, they’re so far ahead of everyone. Enjoy Sally, who is like Dave Mustaine if he was a Japanese girl, and could sing, and play guitar better.
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