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

Brave Girls – Red Sun

Mid-tempo and cruisy isn’t really what I wanted from new popular Brave Girls 2.0, and the squirty synth in the chorus can go fuck itself, but there’s still a good song here despite Braveu-sound’s off-kilter arrangement choices.

Oh My Girl – Dun Dun Dance

I know you don’t believe me, but this song doesn’t have that bird in it.  However here’s the bit you really won’t believe – Oh My Girl’s last song that did have the bird in it was actually significantly better than this one.

Keembo – Whatever

Keembo’s latest isn’t as bad as their usual “vehicle for the vocals” trash, but it isn’t as good as “Inside” either.

Ailee – Make Up Your Mind

Ignore the music and you’re left with a useful case study in how much better Ailee looks in casual clothes than in formal dresses.

Amber Liu – Complicated

Amber’s approach to creating content is like Jay Park’s – “if I do one song per week, statistically one of them will be a hit eventually”.  Don’t buy a lottery ticket, Amber, this week isn’t your week.

Baekhyun & Seomoontak – Hurt

I don’t care if you have rock instruments, it’s not rock if you don’t rock out.

Kang Hye Yeon – Pretend To Pretend

Google Translate did the best it could with the song title but I’m really not sure about it, if you have a better translation for 척하면 척 let me know.  The song itself isn’t bad either as far as trot goes, it comes across as a limp, less catchy version of Lizzy’s “Not An Easy Girl“, which is still a net positive.

Jeong Dongwon – My Favorite

Here’s the male version, which is just a bit too one-note for me to really digest.

Hyelin – Lonely

Wasn’t Hyelin supposed to be “the fun girl” in EXID or something?  Her new song is about as much fun as getting your house broken into when you’re on holiday.

Hi Cutie – Gray Area

There’s no gray area here, it’s just total shit from start to finish.

NCT Dream x Pinkfong – Dinosaurs A to Z

“Pinkfong” is the brains behind that “baby shark” song that went super popular a while back.  I just looked at YouTube now and Baby Shark has 8.5 billion views, no doubt all from kids just playing that shit on repeat like hypnotised zombies.  People complained about YouTube’s changing of their policy to mark videos as “for kids” and ineligible for monetisation, but honestly that was one of the best moves that YouTube ever did because it de-incentivises mining children for coin with this crap. 

NCT Dream – Hot Sauce

So anyway SM are riding the Pinkfong crossover train in an attempt to nab some of these kids as they turn into teenagers who might become interested in some k-pop boys and their “hot sauce”.  Of course they’re talking about literal sauce, not anything else, I mean you can see them holding the sauce bottle in the video.  Wow you’re disgusting, what’s wrong with you?  If the k-pop world if you’re perceptive and can read, that just means you’re a creep.

VAV – Always

Such an effort to mime lame “for the fans” content.

CNBLUE – Zoom

Not much zooming happening here, unless the title is referring to the Zoom meeting where these guys all decided to get back together and bore us to death with a half-speed version of the uncredited Crying Nut covers old songs that made them popular.

Shaun ft. Wonstein – Blue

I really wanted to get behind this one because Shaun triggers people and it’s funny but the song sucks so it’s a nope from me.

Shaun – Closed Ending

It’s like his songs are made in some soulless clone factory like… oh wait, this is a k-pop blog.  Never mind, forget I said anything.

015B ft. Dawon – Waiting For Victor

The latest collab from the eternally retro 015B sounds like duo-era BOL4 if they put some of that “we hate each other” energy into actual songwriting.

Sura – Badly

That chorus is maddeningly repetitive and addictive.  Clear some room in your head before listening because there’s going to be some space taken up in there for a while.

Bibi – Life is a Bi…

If only Bibi could do music as well as she does visually arresting imagery.

Bibi – Bad Sad and Mad

A song of this length is barely even worth reviewing.  Any song less than 2 minutes long needs to be at about 250 BPM to make up for the lost time.

Miso – Slow Running

Is she called “Miso” because she sounds like she’s trying to sing and drink miso soup at the same time?

Meena – Me, Na

I bet if you reverse that backwards talking at the start it says “this song is shit, just skip it”.

Sumin and Zion.t – Creamppang

In what chemically altered state did people actually think those autotuned high notes were a good idea.

Lil Cherry – G!

It’s almost accidentally good, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the result that Lil Cherry intended given her commitment to crap music in general.

Punch – We’re Breaking Up

It’s clear that there’s two songwriting teams for Punch – one who writes all her really good OST stuff, and one who writes all her other kind of crap ballad music.

Lyra – Haze

All prettiness and ambience, no song.

Ballonfish – Dancing In The Moonlight

It’s unfortunate when a rock song still sounds like a ballad even when it’s not trying to be one because the correct pacing just isn’t there.

Haneol – Fantasy(2021 version)

I don’t remember the original version but I’m sure I shat on it sometime in the past.

Ju Wontak – Disappearing Star

Are there a bunch of people out there putting up “form a band” advertisements in music stores saying “hi I play rock guitar but I’m really into boring shit, what am I doing with my life, please kill me now or maybe hire me for your musical project” or what.

Gwangil Jo – Rambo

Fast rapping can’t save an average beat.

KyJUN – Go Away! Corona

More like “Go Away! Corona songs!” if you ask me.

No:el – Ride or die & yangAHchi

The other day I had League Of Legends open and someone invited me into a ranked game.  Note for context that my name in League Of Legends is also “Kpopalypse” (I play Oceania servers only, there’s another Kpopalypse active on North American servers I believe) so they knew I was a k-pop fan of some description.  When I got in one of them said “hi, we’re all BTS fans!  Let’s start a game!” I told them that BTS fucking suck and were the worst k-pop group ever and left the party immediately before they had a chance to respond.  I have no idea why I thought of this just now, and I know that has nothing to do with this song, but it’s my roundup and I’ll shit on songs how I want to.

Neal (feat. Bigone) – Lonely Boy

On the one hand, Korean pop fans are obsessed with vocal ability to a creepily unhealthy extent, and on the other hand literally every single k-pop song has autotune all over it.  It’s usually not as obvious as it is here, but rest assured that ALL of your favourite k-pop vocal tracks use it, and I really do mean ALL.

Greenbeige – Highfive

No.

Greener – Hey My Love

Can we stop projecting our romantic fantasies on little kids to try and make it “cute”?  It’s actually kind of fucked up and disgusting, stop doing this thanks.

Bchae – Wanna Be Your Happy

If you wanna happy, every wanna happy – there’s not much happy to be found here however.

Bobae – 0%

Her fingers don’t match the chords I hear so I don’t know what the fuck is up with that.  It’s her song, surely she could get it right.

Duetto – The Moon

I’ve met too many people in the classical music world who have turned out to be arch fuckheads, whenever I see something like this I just think about how the people involved were probably all in those molka chatrooms.  That’s probably really unfair and maybe they did nothing wrong, but I can’t think of any other reason why people would make music like this except to con people into thinking they were sensitive and “not like those problematic pop boys” or whatever .

Ben – Because I Am A Woman

The should have called it “Because I Am A Curtain”.

Choyoung ft. Hangzoo – You

It’s about time we finally heard again from Choyoung and Hangzoo, after their last song I was wondering when they would come back to wow us again.  Sorry, just kidding, I have no idea who these fucking people are plus the song sucks.

Aalia – My Happy Place

It’s cool that her happy place is out in the wilderness, can we just leave her and her “Jason Mraz at half speed” songs there please.

Epitone Project – Reason

At least they’re drinking tea and not coffee.

Mush – I have no xxx

I don’t think I have any xxx either.

Lee Hyojung – After Rai

Those weird keyboards try hard to stand out and make a difference, but it’s not enough to save the song from its own bad melody writing and slow pace.

Kimujoo – Garden Balsam

It’s just too smooth and nice, there’s a good song here but they needed to add some darkness into the mix instead of this happy strummy crap.

Darksoul Virus – On The R Reborn

Why does this group have a name like a speed gabba ninjacore trance industrial grind project, yet sounds like literally everything else in roundup this week anyway.

Firstsex – Fish Feear

More promising names and bad music.  You’d hope your first sexual experience wouldn’t be this much of a plodding disaster.

MC Meta & DJ Tiz – Under

The best Korean hip-hop can usually do is that mid-paced song halfway through a Gang Starr record that you’ll usually skip over.

Seogi – Parents

I didn’t ask to be born and I didn’t ask for this song either.

Saehyeon – The Reason I Live On

Look at 1:10 how she shakes her head “no I don’t want the fucking cream scoop” and then he just gives it to her anyway, like “fuck you, take it, take my cream you whore”.  The dude probably has a one-way mirror that faces into his bedroom with a camera behind it.

Mamiya – Way Out

Bad funk music isn’t it.

Aleph – Instant Lover

Oh boring.

608 (feat. YeRinSong) – Space

There’s some real promise here with the instrumental treatments, but it’s just so plodding.

Harlyn – Square Blue

Gets negative 10000000 points for giving McDonalds free promo.  Or maybe it isn’t free, but this song doesn’t scream “happy meal time endorsement tune” to me.

BONUS RANDOM VIDEO OF THE WEEK

APOKI – Get It Out – band live version

The sad state of virtual idols.  We barely even got to see Aespa’s avatar versions at all, yet now we’re stuck with this fucking rabbit girl on a motorcycle.  Notice how they couldn’t be fucked working out how to animate her actually getting off the thing so they just skipped that bit, as well as the disposal of the bike before the song starts, which is odd given how much of a commitment they made to driving it up there in real-time, at least they could get one of her bunny backdancers to drive it off.  The real show here of course is not the CGI, but the backing band trying to be as nondescript, boring and un-rock-like as humanly possible, because we wouldn’t want to get too fucking excited now would we, although I guess in this context it makes sense because more active band members might get in the way of bunnyface’s projection space and break the fourth wall of the incredible realism that we’re seeing.

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