It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s check out some new releases!

IU – Blueming

Did BOL4 just throw IU a crappy album reject track?  It certainly sounds like it.

WJSN – As You Wish

Nothing much happening here I’m afraid, but at least everyone looks great.  Apparently some people were actually complaining about the outfits here, which just goes to show some people have no clue about anything.

SuperM – Let’s Go Everywhere

SperM are actually doing quite well as a competitor to BTS, as so far they’re both equally musically uninteresting.

Astro – Blue Flame

Surely the song being called “Blue Flame” and that sousaphone noise in the chorus are not a coincidence.  They just needed a dance routine to match with trousers splitting in syncronisation.

CIX – Numb

Some okay rhythms but as usual, not much of a song to go on top.

Golden Child – Wannabe

Golden Child are using a slightly different synth patch for the toot toot noise but apart from this, it’s just the same old.

Golden Child – Compass

Their other song isn’t much either, the writing is okay but it’s too pedestrian to be exciting.  Recommended at 1.25x speed only.

MBA ft. EK, Bola, Make A Movie – Lambo

Ugh.

Aweek – Breathe

Hey this is okay I guess but it doesn’t really light my fire.

Bryn – Lilly

They must be shitting me.  How can this possibly be a feature track by anyone’s standards.  Even Jay Park would probably reject this one.

Jun Hyo Seong – Starlight

It’s nice to have her back, even if the song is rubbish and she’s avoiding the elephant in the room as much as possible.

Amber Liu – Curiosity

Her other song from last week was better, this is pretty weak actually.  I don’t know if the cops should arrest her for it but I think she should at least get a warning.

Jane ft. Stella Jang – C’est La Vie

It’s kind of jazz-fusionish but actually I don’t mind it too much.  I guess I’m so starved of anything with guitar in k-pop lately that I’ll take this.

Sungmin – Orgel

This is just not necessary.

Mommy Son ft. Eugene Park – Star Song

That mouth-hole looks like a vagina and it’s really distracting me from the song, which is actually pretty good.

ONE – Hard To Love

More Autotuned warblers.  This sound is dead in the upbeat pop tracks but it still lives in crappy slow R&B-style rap ballads.

Dindin ft. Lyn – Liar

More slow jazz and bullshit.

Dindin ft. Lee Wonseok – Fallin’ Down

The other song is somewhat better, if a bit ordinary.

Damoim – Forever 84

I like it how hip-hop guys are standing in front of planes instead of cars now, like they’re gonna go flying through their ‘hood all swag and shit.  Give it a rest you losers, we all know you rent everything except your shoes.

Son A Reum – Sorrow Flied With The Wind

That weird sub-bass interference that comes in at 0:58 surely isn’t deliberate but it still sounds better than any of the noises in the song that are supposed to be there.

Hailey (loves. YuSeungWoo) – Luvstagram

Boycott all mobile-phone-window music videos for a better world.

Adoy – Lemon

It’s actually pretty nice in the chorus, but pretty bland for the rest of it.  Cool video though, which proves that there’s always new concepts to try.  Look out for other k-pop artists making “juice squeezing in space” videos, it might be a plagiarism!

Sleepy – imFINE

This could have been okay, but he ruined it with that singing.  Nobody wants to hear rap guys sing.

Dynamic Duo – Flash

Especially not these rap guys.  Dynamic Duo are two of the best rappers Korea has ever produced and they rap about 15% of the time and have good beats about 2% of the time.  What a waste.

Layone ft. Ja Mezz – Slow Heartbeat

Even this rap with the stupid flow is somewhat better than Dynamic Duo this week.  Isn’t it sad.

Minah – Butterfly

Having seen her in the flesh, none of her videos capture how good she looks including this one, although here they at least haven’t got ten tons of smoky makeup on her that doesn’t suit her.

Crush – With You

They walk backwards a lot in this video which seems appropriate as the song is pretty backwards too.

Maydoni – Weak

Actually really unusual, but unfortunately unusual doesn’t always mean good.

Model Mob – New New New

Some stuff just isn’t even worth writing a crappy written-while-taking-a-shit sentence about.

Can – Cool Guy

At least they look they’re having fun.  Bonus points for correct harness use by the backing dancers.

Im Byung Soo – Ora Ora

Let’s not have a Buena Vista Social Club trend in k-pop thanks.

Oyeon – Pretend It’s Fine

Don’t worry, no-one’s pretending.  This is shit.

Kim Youngchul – Signal Light

They just play anything for sax-synth riffs these days.

dress, sogumm ft. Kim Ximya, Hyun Su – However

Could they have made an uglier video if they tried?  I definitely get the feeling I’m being trolled here.

Southcarrey – Summer Love

All the seasons are mixed up in k-pop now, and it’s a good thing to see.  The whole “summer songs only in summer, winter songs only in winter, or you can’t have success” is truly basic-ass thinking for numbskulls.

Mmazel ft. Su Jeong – In Fact

Acoustic guitar and green fields is a no.

bobae – Don’t Treat Me Bad

More unexciting R&B that you won’t listen to more than ten seconds of because you have better things to do.

Muzie – Apologize

How to fool people into thinking “city pop” is a real genre and not just a marketing buzzword used to rebrand music that’s been around for decades – equalise all the meat out of the funk guitars and put massive amounts of lens flare on all your video’s light sources.  Presto: “it’s so innovative, man”.

Sin Ye Young – Why Break Up?

Blowing all your cash on drugs and having an affair was bad, but it’s the ballads that are the deal-breaker.  I’m not a doormat you know.

Jukjae – Lullaby

How come whenever there’s a bridge in a k-pop ballad video it never collapses.

Gift – Regret

IU’s guitar is better than a Martin guitar for the same money so fuck off.

BDC – Da Capo

More trash.

Broken Fingers – Love Turning Sour

The dudes in this band must be ugly if they’re willing to give 100% of their screen time to some very unexcited looking model just doing random shit.

Ryu Soo Hwan – Hide And Seek

Is this a multiple choice question?  Can I choose “hide”?

cotoba – Loss

Is this loss?  I certainly feel like I’ve lost something while listening.

Sanna ft. Bumsu Kim – Jesus Is My King

This corny religious bullshit is actually better than most of the other songs this week.

Collective Arts, Hwang Dabin – Letter Of Apology

They should definitely apologise for inflicting this crap on us.

SMTOWN – This is Your Day (for every child, UNICEF)

Let’s be honest, SM is just rubbing it in BigHit’s faces: “ha ha, you guys performed for a dictatorship that’s bombing children, we didn’t, we might not be able to beat you on the charts but we’re still better UNICEF ambassadors!”

BONUS RANDOM VIDEO OF THE WEEK

This video of Kpopalypse’s cat has nothing to do with Goo Hara

Go and search “Goo Hara” on YouTube right now, and you’ll see everyone making Goo Hara videos about the “breaking news” to try and desperately milk out some web traffic from grieving people.  Most of these videos are super-lazy and have obviously been rushed out to capture the clicks, and there’s literally thousands of them, so many that you actually have to scroll down a fair way past them to find any of Goo Hara’s songs.  So since everyone else and their cat seems to be involved in making “Goo Hara content” right now, I thought I’d better get my own cat involved too.  Please enjoy this cat content which has actually nothing to do with Goo Hara except for the mention of her name in the video title, it doesn’t even have a Goo Hara song playing in the background or anything.

---

That’s all for this week’s roundup – Kpopalypse roundup will return next week!