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

GWSN – Bazooka

Unfortunately if you follow the white rabbit you just end up at a shit disco.

Taeyeon – Happy

A try at semi doo-wop style that had some potential (think “Lion Heart“), but it really needed to be fast and light, not deep and heavy.  That thudding bass and pedestrian drum machine beat is doing the song no favours.

Vivichu – Oppa Ya

Sadly not the Vivi and Chuu Loona subunit we all need, but a fairly average trot song about middle-aged women fighting over some dude because they somehow aren’t totally over men in general by this point.

Fanatics – V.A.V.I. Girl

I’m pretty sure that they just couldn’t pronounce “Barbie”.  Anyway this has some chunky sounds but the vocal melody is too obnoxious to contain any of what made “Milkshake” so good.

Burvey – Swing Bebe

After hearing story after story of the mega-abuse of underage people behind the scenes in k-pop, songs like this just make me want to call child protection.

Vitamin – Now I Know

Having said that, Vitamin’s song is actually pretty good.  Let’s hope these kids aren’t being beaten and starved within an inch of their life like… oh who am I kidding, of course they are, just like every Korean idol group ever.

NCT Dream – Ridin’

Meanwhile SM’s youngest group have all officially grown up now, so enjoy fapping over their token “badass but I still got blue hair” concept.

NCT (Mark & Johnny) – QTAH (Quality Time at Home)

I bet as soon as this was done they ripped those polaroids off the walls immediately and said “thank fuck that’s over with”.

Got7 – Poison

Looks like half of their suits were put in the wrong washing machine cycle and the colour faded – this is what happens when the costume designer gives the work experience kid the serious jobs.

Astro – Knock

After GOT7’s cleaners ruined the suits it looks like Astro picked them up.  Like their clothes, Astro’s song makes GOT7’s seem relatively colourful.

Got7 – Aura

The blindfolds are a clever gimmick though.  K-pop performers get their routines bashed into their heads so damn much that they could probably all do this no problem.

Got7 – Love You Better

Imagine having cool sounds like this and wasting them on R&B.

TVXQ! – Cheering

One of those pathetic “look how far we’ve come” nostalgic “for the fans” songs that everybody with a brain hates.

Highschool’s Yebin – Would You Be My Love

These girls were promoting distancing before COVID was even a thing, so where are all the stans at?  BTS are so gutless about their supposed “message” these days that “keep 1.5m distance” would probably be “too political” for them, why don’t you ARMYs stan Highschool instead.

Kaachi – Your Turn

This song isn’t any better or worse than much of the rest of this week’s crap so if you’re hating on it in particular you’re just a racist.  I know it’s trendy for young people on social networks to be as racist as possible these days but fuck that, I say good on these girls for giving it a go and proving that they can be just as mediocre and boring as any established k-pop artist.

Yoyomi – Come Back

I’m not much into this song that sounds like it was recorded in 1862 but I could look at Yoyomi here all day.

Oohyo – Brave

Unfortunately it’s not quite up there with her best stuff but I’ll take Oohyo on a bad day over your bias on a good one, most of the time.

Ravi, Ailee – What About You

Shit ballad exists and Ailee is too skinny.  It’s a shame that she only ever does videos like this when she’s skinny, and whenever she gains weight she goes into hiding – I get the reasoning because Korean society is so Nazi-ish about fat people but I want fat Ailee back damnit.  Is it too much to ask.

Yesung x Suran – Still Standing

Listening to two performers sitting down singing a song called “still standing” is like SM pairing idol pop and singers that they’ve acquired through competition-erasing business deals and expecting us to think they get along.  It’s one thing to keep 1.5m apart but look at these two not even make eye contact.

Yoon Soo Hyun – Dance

Trot + green screen hell.

Amber Liu & James Lee – Alright

Amber: “let’s do a song in a setting as far away from a subway platform as possible so we don’t remind anyone of anything in particular… what, a desert?  Sounds good!”

Minseo – No Good Girl

As far as boring songs nobody cares about go, this is pretty okay.

Ha:tfelt – Life Sucks

Sorry but I know plenty of people who self-harm including some very close to me, and it doesn’t change the fact that this song is dull and made me feel nothing at all.

Ha:tfelt – Solitude

Is she going to do a video for every boring meandering R&B infused piece of shit on her new album or what.

Ha:tfelt – Cigar

Even she knew this one was barely even worth the effort of making a video for.

Bibi – Kazino

They really don’t know how shit they sound when they turn that machine up all the way, do they.

Blackleaf – Suffocated

It’s almost there, it just needed someone to step on the distortion a bit fucking sooner.

Hyangni – Blessing Spell

You know it’s a dull week in k-pop when even Hyangni’s new song is some half-tempo “let’s sit around and get stoned” boring bullshit.

BJ Yoon Evil Force ft. Lee Jeong Seon – Street

Korea in general has no idea what the problem even is, you know it when you get fed up and play a song like this at 2x speed and instead of turning into a horrid chipmunkish mess it suddenly just sounds like the way it should have been recorded all along.

Crying Nut – Oh! What A Shiny Night

That group that CNBlue ripped all their material from are back to prove that they’re the kings of average rock and not some idol upstarts thank you very much.

Dareharu – Flowering

Why does this shit I’ve never even heard of have 1.5m views?  Maybe because it’s QUICK, damnit.

Kim Shin Ill – Love Fades

The backings are really quite nice but the guy sounds like he’s trying to blast the entire song out of his left nostril.

Seori – Hairdryer

A boring jazz song in a sneaky ambient disguise.

GroovyRoom ft. pH-1 – Palette

Actually shocked me by a being simple, bass-heavy and kind of ass-kicking – everything Groovyroom has never been.  Sure it’s pretty generic beats but “generic and not that innovative” is like 57 steps up in quality from where Groovyroom usually is.

Hahoe x Moai ft. Takuwa – Sagging Pants

Fuck them for putting a Windows crash noise into their song.  I flinch by association when I hear that shit.

Yelo, John Park – Airplane Mode

Pretty, but boring.  I guess that makes it “pretty boring”.

Paloalto, Jo Hyun Ah, Hash Swan, Dbo – Happy Call

Look at these fuckheads.

Legit Goons – Party & Bullshit

Title is 50% accurate song title of the week.

Selin – Sweet Breeze

Okay so here’s a song about some chick learning to ride a bike or some bullshit and it’s really quite good.  See, I don’t hate everything.  And for those of you who are like “why do you only like nugus” didn’t you just read me shit on the previous 57 nugus that got into roundup with their slow boring crap?

LIVE B-SIDES THAT WERE B-SIDES FOR A FUCKING REASON SECTION

NCT Dream – Quiet Down

I should have never allowed live stage B-sides into roundup in the first place.  Now I’m paying for it with a fucking deluge of shit songs like this every week.

Oh My Girl – Dolphin

Seriously, take out f(x), CLC and IU and the amount of good B-stages across the entirety of k-pop over the last 30 years is lower than YG’s preferred dating age.

(G)i-dle – Luv U

It’s not worth looking at stuff like this for ten seconds even one time.  Absolute rubbish music, almost always.

April – Oops I’m Sorry

It’s nice that these songs exist to fill up albums I guess, you’ve got something you can have a conversation with your friends over before the playlist loops back around to a song you care about.

Apink – Overwrite

Also if you have annoying friends who don’t know about k-pop yet but keep asking you about it, you can play them songs like these so they hate it and never want to talk about it ever again, saving you a ton of awkward conversations when you wish they’d just fuck off.

BONUS RANDOM VIDEO OF THE WEEK

BLACKPINK – DDU-DU DDU-DU / METAL COVER (FunnyLeech)

Okay it’s time to wake up from this week’s dreary bullshit music with something that kicks a bit of ass.  As much as I’m not that sold on this particular genre of metal, I’ve got to admit that Blackpink’s “Ddu-du Ddu-du” fits so perfectly into this nu-school metalcore style that they’re pretty much djent in disguise.  When you think about it, the main appeal of Blackpink’s latest two songs is the power of the riffs, the sonic production and carefully-applied dynamics, and that’s a very metal aesthetic.  Every single Blink is a metalhead, whether they know it or not.

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