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

CL – Post Up

CL finally delivers somewhat on her promise as a Korean rapper.   I don’t understand why it took her this long to write some fucking bars.  Now go join The Black Eyed Peas already.

Mamamoo – Wanna Be Myself

A pretty good chorus gives some life to a song which is otherwise a bit unspectactular.  As usual, at least they look mostly great although why they continually dress Hwasa in garbage bags is beyond me.

Ha:tfelt – La Luna

Reggae is all about the production and aside from Primary nobody in Korea can really get it right.  This attempt isn’t worth your time.

Jeon Youl – Mamacita

You know with a title like “Mamacita” it’s going to be that trashy Latin sound we all hate.  There’s about one new song coming out somewhere in the world called “Mamacita” per week at the moment and they’re all as fucking shit as this one.

Hana ft. Lee Soonjung – You Know?

Shades of “Manyo Maash” but the subdued backings let it down – a little bit more grit in the arrangement and this would have really kicked ass. 

Serri – Come Closer

Guess what Dal Shabet’s Serri has been doing lately?  Nothing of note as it happens.

Rocoberry – Roco Is Roco

Shit is shit.

Stray Kids – Back Door

Stray Kids overall have the sort of songwriting that I keep expecting from the more hyped current k-pop boy groups but never end up getting.  Just when it’s starting to sound a bit too much like everyone else’s generic boy group trash, something different pops up or there’s a chord change that keeps everything alive.

Moonbin & Sanha – Bad Idea

Everything else just sounds kind of like this.

Day 6 (Even Of Day) – Landed

There’s no point having the sounds if you don’t have the song.

ID:Earth – Human

This song would have been great if it actually went somewhere, but it just sort of meanders around boringly.

Idiotape – Sorry To Greta

Work with a vocalist already.  I’m sick of hearing these great tracks that sound like something’s seriously missing.

Sik-K, Big Naughty, Woodie Gochild, Haon, Trade L – DDDD Freestyle

They’re trying hard for that abs category but the problem is nobody knows who they are.

Sik-K, Golden, pH-1, Jay Park – Gotta Go

Is it just me or is Jay Park looking more and more like Oli London with each new video?

Knave ft. Soovi – Hotcake

Come back when you’ve finished cleaning your room, and also when your music taste has changed a bit.

Geeks – Heartbreak Hotel

So settle the debate for me and tell me if Yoyomi is in this video.  I don’t think it’s her but it does look like her from some angles.

Bcalm ft. Maddox – Dive

Dude, she’s too short to be an effective basketballer.  Stop giving her false hope just because you want to get laid.

Khakii ft. Leellamarz – Midsommar

A promisingly weird intro leads into the usual stupid garbage.

Arisha – Ride On Me

Quite comically bad but I don’t think anybody in the target audience cares.

Wazzy – Fantasia

Sophisticated and boring.

Gist ft. Leellamarz – Promise

It’s nice to have a different rhythm to usual even if it is jazz but when the Autotune burps its way into the second half of the song all hope of any quality leaves the premises.

BE’O – That’s Wolf

Now San E is hosting other Autotuned warbling R&B crap singers on his own channel, god help us all.  JYP you did the right thing.

GV ft. EK – CoCo

Wow this just missed out on my dance-focused Nugu Alert what a shame.  Also why is one guy wearing a pumpkin on his head, this isn’t the final boss of Minecraft you wanker.

Vincit – Strike Out

Just a tad too generic to get over the line but at least it has some weird BC Rich clone guitar even if the guitar solo editing sucks.

Peakboy – Loop

Wow this is boring.

Ovan – Happy Birthday

Young couples publicly in love are kind of disgusting really.  We don’t want to imagine you rubbing genitals together, stop hogging the Nugu Park roundabout for your stupid photoshoots and go hire a love hotel so we don’t have to see it.

Soma ft. Jaedal – Home

Coffee shop music at half speed is just as boring as it sounds…

Risso – Let’s Fall In Love

…but it’s not as boring as coffee-shop music at a third of the speed!

Seoulmoon – Festival

Hey this song’s really boring but I dig the equipment these people have.  Korea is just a forest of people making amazingly shitty music with some of the coolest instruments.

PO.U.RYU – The Cat

does not mrcs

Ccola ft. U-Turn – Weak

Accurate song title of the week.

Chuther – Lazygirl

The girl has personality on camera but this is another reggae failure.

Kyung Dasom – Wanna Be Yours

Yeah nah.

Boohwal – The Moment

This completely silly metal ballad reminds me of “The Room” from the long-haired lead singer to the inappropriate use of flowers everywhere and a miscast girl who looks like she would rather be somewhere else.

Kim Ji Soo – Alone Again

He looks like the kind of guy who would call a girl “m’lady” and lay down his coat over a puddle so her feet wouldn’t get wet when she walked through it even though she could just walk around it and she’s wearing shoes anyway.

Swan – When I Think Of You

I wasn’t even listening to this trash, I was just watching that moon to see if they’d managed to make it move a little relative to the mountains to simulate the Earth’s rotation.  The things that I have to do to keep myself amused during this boring crap.

KissN – Luv Scars

I’m pretty sure I saw this in a previous week’s list and thought “nah I’m not even gonna write about it, it’s so shit and generic” but it turned up in my list again so here it is.

DK – Please

Hey this doesn’t sound like “Holiday In Cambodia“, this band sure aren’t how I remember.

Leewoo – A Reason To Break Up

If you need a reason, I think listening to shit Korean ballads would be a pretty good one.

Rockit Girl – Dreams Come True

Rockit Girl do their best to save roundup from itself this week and it’s not their best song ever but I’ll still take Rockit Girl on a bad day.  Check out the line distribution for this group, that other girl Della is really shunted to the sidelines isn’t she.  I hope she’s cool with it and we don’t get a BOL4-style meltdown in a few months.

BONUS RANDOM VIDEO OF THE WEEK

BLACKPINK – How You Like That (metal cover by Leo Moracchioli)

What a lot of people including a lot of Blackpink’s own fans don’t understand yet is that Blackpink are absolutely a heavy metal group now, this has been the case since “Ddu-du Ddu-du“.  Listen to how much sense their newer songs make with any kind of metal treatment (I mean their songs as a self-contained unit, miss me with that western collab rubbish).  This isn’t coincidental, it’s because Blackpink’s songs have been borrowing heavily from metal’s tonal vocabulary lately in ways that other Korean pop songs do not.  The guitars might not be there, but the riffs, rhythms and attitude that drive any good heavy metal song certainly are.  Hopefully this starts a trend and more people start understanding the relationship between Blackpink’s more recent material and what their songwriters are emulating.  Maybe we’ll see a trend of other groups effectively taking this style one step further into actual metal territory and then we can truly say that Blackpink paved the way.

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