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

PSY feat. Suga of BTS – That That

It’s nice that PSY is back being PSY and reminding everyone who really paved the way for western k-pop success, but his new song while agreeably upbeat doesn’t really have the type of hook that a song like this so desperately needs.  Seeing PSY slipping in a very quick nod to the horse-dance is like listening to Public Image Limited in the 1990s when they started sampling Sex Pistols songs – a reminder that his cultural relevance has had its day.

Moonbyul – C.I.T.T. (Cheese in the Trap)

Moonbyul finally gets the great song that she deserves and it’s about time.  Whoever had the idea to add that weird slowdown before the chorus probably deserves a smack in the face with the RBW dorm double-ended dildo, but other than that it’s excellent.

Wheein – D-Day

Wheein’s song is also uncharacteristically great.  Remember not that long ago when Wheein released 67 songs in one week with videos for each, and they all sucked, plus she inexplicably looked like crap in all of them despite being a super attractive person generally?  Well both of those problems have now been fixed, this power-ballad thing is really cool and the Chrissy Amphlett schoolgirl-but-not vibe really works for Wheein visually.  Not sure what’s in the water over at Mamamoo land lately but they’ve really stepped up their game.

Solar – Rest in Gyeonggi-do

Well okay, two out of three ain’t bad.

LE SSERAFIM – Fearless

An agreeably slinky bassline is the best thing here, but the choice of play-it-safe boy group style pentatonic melodies and that ba-ba-ba-ba-bland hook ensure that the song goes nowhere interesting.  I guess all the good songwriters at HYBE already jumped ship to work with Viviz.

MONSTA X – Love

A common issue with boy group songs – a really cool backing track that’s been kneecapped by some very unimaginative vocal stylings.  This track would have worked a lot better as an instrumental, or with someone writing the melody who had a clue.

Miyeon – Drive

You know those pencils that all the girls had in high school that were adorned with bright coloured stripes and weird little fuzzy things on top?  I bet whoever designed this video was that one girl in school who had a whole bedazzled pencil case full of those things.

Lee Sujeong – Walking Thought The Moon

Lovelyz’ Baby Soul both looks and sounds completely uncomfortable in this fairly unexciting solo song, I’ve seen people waiting for a proctologist session look more at ease with themselves.

E’LAST – Creature

The audacity of the drink-and-pass-out concept.  It’s like they’re doing roleplays for when they get to be sex offenders like the k-pop A-list. 

Busters – Futt

Actually “futt” isn’t a German word.  The German word for fuck is “ficken”, however it’s not as ubiquitously used as the English “fuck”.  “Ficken” is used more commonly for insults that have a literal sexual context (“dein hund soll deine mutter ficken” – “your dog fucks your mother”), most German insults that are linguistically equivalent to insults in English that have “fuck” in them usually use different words in German. “Dich” (dick) and “scheiße” (shit) are much more common when building “compound swears” in German, e.g “das ist mir scheißegal” might have “shit” in the actual swear but the meaning translates most accurately to “I don’t give a fuck” in English.  As for this song specifically, das ist ja kinderkacke (“this is some childish bullshit”).

ICHILLIN’ – Play Hide & Seek

Surprisingly, Busters don’t have the most awkward concept in a k-pop song this week.  Why did the poor girls from ICHILLIN get lumbered with sloppily-fitting 19th century whorehouse clothes.  Nice try getting me onside with the cat thumbnail but the cat is only in it for two seconds, I’m not sure if this is enough to mrcs

NCT Dream – It’s Yours

Warning sign: pastel pink trousers.

DKB – Sober

So just before I listened to this song for roundup, I listened to this pitch test video that a reader gave me via my retrospring page.  Then DKB’s song came on and it had exactly that same crappy piano sound in the intro, I thought I was still doing the pitch test.  Little did I know, the real test was to come – sitting through this bullshit song.

Treasure – Darari

You know how YG sometimes get one of their groups to put out a dance video of a song that didn’t get feature track status, and it turns out to be a better song than the ones they actually ended up making proper videos for?  This definitely isn’t one of those times.

RoaD-B – Nonstop

My song submitter told me that RoadB used to be called BXK.  I’m not sure what changing out one random group of letters for another is supposed to achieve beyond confusing the group’s marketing department, but I look forward to this group’s eventual renaming to QWERASDF.

Cosmo – Milky Way

This song is bland and it’s KARD’s fault.  They were the only well-known co-ed group for quite a few years and they churned out so many crappy tropical shithouse songs, so now everyone associates co-ed with that trop-shit sound.  So when a new co-ed group comes out we have to put up with the trop slop again because people who run C-tier k-pop agencies have no imagination and can’t think outside the box.

Soyou feat. BE’O – Business

A photo session disguised as a song.  Honestly a waste of time if you’re actually into music, but we know what k-pop fans who are in deep are like – they don’t care about music, they care about blind worship and total adherence to the cult only.  They’ll eat this up.

Yoon Jisung – Bloom

I always hate it when gamers say to game developers “stop adding new things to the game, fix you game first” because they’re too stupid to understand that in an AAA-tier game the people who bugfix and the people who add new shit are two entirely separate teams of people with completely different skillsets.  That would be like me asking the people who made all the high-quality knitwear in k-pop videos to help with the low-quality songwriting.

DJ Soda X Spriti Link – Cold

DJ Soda really isn’t my type, and I don’t like her music that much either as it’s just that generic electronic laziness that DJs think for some reason constitutes music, but I was sad to hear about her getting unfairly harassed by American airport security dickheads recently so at the very least I will fap to this video one time in her honour because after watching it I feel like that’s what she would want.

BOOKKU DDOONG feat. Choi Yoojung – SSOOK DDOONG

Hahaha boys looking like girls doing the girl aegyo thing with the girl germs gosh it is so funny because it is so icky and goes against my oh so solid hetero gender identity ahem ha ha I am laughing chortle smirk guffaw giggle oh my.  Okay, is that what you wanted, can we get a more sophisticated gag for next time that doesn’t lean on the audience being mega bigots kthx.

Minseo – #Self_Trip

I can’t even remember anything else this girl has done since the great “Is Who” and by the sound of her new song that’s probably not going to change.

Chang Kiha – Envy None

This is the laziest sign language video I’ve ever seen, I feel like I’ve learned nothing.

Yedd – Confession

Fresh from Kpopalypse Nugu Alert, Yedd returns and her new track fixes the main problem with her previous one.  I don’t quite know what this song is trying to say exactly, but I feel like my sexuality is represented here.

Mirani – Gasoline

You see, this is why I like YEDD so much.  She could have done something like this crap, which is what everyone does, but she chose not to.  That deserves points.

88Rising & Bibi – Best Lover

As usual with anything Bibi is involved in, the music is average but the visuals are amazing and worth the visit on their own.

Sanha – Again

So much millennial-whooping clownery here that they hired an actual clown for the music video and he’s not even the most clown-like thing in it.

Band Nah – Sitcom

Normally I worry when I see people lying on their backs while playing guitar, because that’s one way to crack your wrist for life, but in this case I’m not sure that I care.

Lanalogue – Goblin

Finally this group have a song that is really good.  Big riffs and a big chorus are all you need for a heavy rock song.

KyoungSeo – Dear my X

Who the fuck wears a long yellow dress into the woods.  As if that shit isn’t going to get dirty in about 0.2 seconds, especially once those boys you’re with start fucking around and doing stupid shit, like both of them trying to carry you at once.

Navi – Come To Me

Not awful but kind of dull, I recommend playing at 1.25x speed for best results.

Park Seo Ryoung – Hide and Seek

In another life, Kerrigan May is a boring lounge musician who wears plaid.

5BUT – In The Mood For Love

That yellow guitar, I own one of those, but it’s black and way prettier.  It also fucking sucks for anything with even the slightest amount of distortion.  One day I plan to sell it to some boring person who likes jazz and clean guitar tones because it’s quite good at that, but then they might make music like this with it so perhaps I best keep it locked up and away from other people.

Kim Siho – White Moon

If you don’t have that great a handle on melodies, just wind it all the way down and go for ambience instead.  Hey, it works here.

Tarzanloca – High Dimension

I know what you’re thinking, but most of the aboriginal guys I’ve met wouldn’t be offended at all by a Korean playing an electric version of a didgeridoo, they’d think it was cool.  They’d actually be more offended if a woman played it, because females playing the didgeridoo is actually taboo in some Australian aboriginal cultures (but not all).  I think the real offence with this song is that it’s edging slightly towards dubstep, and dubstep is generally considered offensive to all people in all cultures regardless of how it’s being created.

Big Naughty feat. 10CM – Beyond Love

There’s nothing all that big, or naughty about 10cm.  I was surprised by the inclusion of an actual beat however.

2Z – Keep the Promise

I love the miming fail at 2:21, the guy isn’t even trying to play those notes on the bass.  I wonder if this is a Monkees style group where some other non-kpop looking dudes actually play the instruments.

psv:gun feat. Bumkey – Won A Trophy

Boring song.  What does he want, a trophy?  You’ve already got one, go away.

Kim Doeun feat. So!YoON! – Fort

I feel mean picking on this because it has like two views but it really is offensively bad and I don’t sugar-coat for anybody, not even the groups I like.  Just do better.

Ranui feat. Z – Where Love Has Gone

She looks genuinely pissed off.  I’m convinced she has her knees up to her chest because the cameraman was being a perv and she was just like “fuck you buddy, I’m going to make your job as difficult as I can”.

Lee Soo Young – Sore

I’ll have beef in black bean sauce, thanks.

Mueast – Run_A

It’s honestly a bit fucking sad when these two rock harder than anything else in roundup this week AND are prettier.  Come on k-pop, pull your finger out.

Crucial Star – 100 Bars Rather Than 100 Words

Big meh.  This is about as good as he gets, unfortunately.

Vincent Blue – So What

I like it how they gave the hipster tourist who hooked them up with some weed the bongo drum or whatever, even though there’s actually no drum like that on the track, and let him be in the video anyway.  Bunch of real nice dudes.

GSoul – By My Side

I mean, he’s called “GSoul” for fuck’s sake.  You kind of already know not to listen.

No War – Let Us Return To Home

We should really all work together to stop war in our lifetime.  Not only would there be less dying, misery and human suffering in general, as an added bonus we also wouldn’t have to listen to any more dreary anti-war songs.  Imagine all the people, living life without shit ballads.  You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

BONUS RANDOM VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

Taeyeon’s INVU reaction mashup

Someone should do one of these things with a bunch of boring “YouTube reactors” and also put in an offcut from me on my livestream, listening to 30 seconds of whatever the song happens to be, saying “this is fucking shit” and turning it off.  Make sure you pick a song that I really despise for maximum value.

What does singing WHILE dancing sound like?

A very good video, with lots of very correct observations.  The only thing I have issue with is when he talks about facial expressions as an important part of singing.  For performance on TV, yes – of course.  For actual singing?  Hell no.  Honestly, when you see a really, really good singer sing, i.e not anybody in k-pop (for fucks’ sake stop even looking for good vocalists there you numbskulls), but someone with total vocal mastery who is actually amazingly next-level like, say, Diamanda Galas, or Mike Patton, they don’t give a flying fuck what their face looks like, it’s just a pure instrument used in the service of producing whatever vocal sound is required at that moment.  Actually very good singers tend to look very strange when singing because literally everything they are doing is serving the song, and that can go to some pretty weird places depending on what’s in the song.  There are no good k-pop examples of this because k-pop doesn’t dare.  Oh and don’t be so shy about negative opinions, k-pop fans are only braindead zombies who will try to doxx you and ruin your life, nothing to be afraid of, if you want to shit on Winter and Ningning for performing like robots just fucking do it and own it lol

Solar Eats – Chocolate, Nutella, Choco Dessert Mukbang

Nice try, but my cat outsold.

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