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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Vanishing Paycheck
Whimsy and innocence? In K-Pop? Stranger things have happened. We’ve heard Stella Jang before, first with the wonderfully moody-cum-jazzy Monsieur, then with the 1980s nostalgia trip that was Beautiful. Vanishing Paycheck is more contemporary than either of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to mainstream K-Pop. It opens with a solitary accordion trill,…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Bomb Bomb
It would be too easy to say that KARD’s latest track is—*coughs*—the bomb, but when a song absolutely slaps as much as this one does, I really can’t think of a better descriptor. Bomb Bomb is unquestionably the bomb. Bomb Bomb might be one of the best party songs that K-Pop has put out in…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: 2 1 2
Urban Zakapa is one of Korea’s more prolific R&B groups, with five full albums and multiple extended plays, plus a bevy of K-drama soundtrack contributions, counted in their relatively young careers. 2 1 2 is the title track from Urban Zakapa’s third extended play album, UZ, released in 2015. It’s one of my favorites, with…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Twinkle
The debut title track for Girls’ Generation’s first subunit is interesting for several reasons, not least for its gorgeous set design, outfits, and the well-produced music itself. But Twinkle is also the perfect poster child for one of SM Entertainment’s ethically dubious moneymaking schemes. Periodically throughout the video, viewers are subjected to intrusive, baked-in advertisements…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Love Tonight
Trot is a uniquely Korean genre that’s had somewhat of a resurgence recently, after years of it being treated as “old people music”. Hong Jin Young is one of the artists leading that charge. Teu-ro–teu, also colloquially known as ppongjjak, traces its origins to Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Neon
What exactly is K-Pop? Does it exclusively refer to mass-produced idols, or is there room for a broader definition? Is it kosher to call independent artists K-Pop? How about artists that aren’t even Korean? I bring this up because Neon is bound to become a lightning rod for this argument. Yukika, the artist behind this…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Nothing Lasts Forever
With Girl’s Day’s Sojin announcing her departure from her agency, yet another one of my favorite groups has bitten the metaphorical dust. Nothing lasts forever, indeed. This is another one of those cases where fans saw the writing on the wall far before any official rumblings of trouble started. Girl’s Day’s last album released in…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Winter Rain
Winter is winding down, and that means I have precious few days left to share as much cold weather-inspired music as possible. A lot of Korean indie music fits the snowy months the best, and Seyoung’s Winter Rain is no exception to that rule. Maybe it’s the soothing synth, or the cold-tinted music video, or…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Fiction
Before the boy group Highlight overthrew the yoke of agency contracts and struck out a new path as independent artists in 2016, they performed for seven years under the name B2ST. Fiction, the title track to their Fiction And Fact album, is arguably the standout song in B2ST’s discography—although both 2010’s Shock or 2011’s On…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Night
A confession: I usually crank these out sometime past midnight, with a mug of tea, and the lights dimmed. Maybe that’s why my picks tend to skew toward the quietly emotive. Anyway, here’s one more. Eunji (not to be confused with the Apink idol of the same name) is an indie artist who released her…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: LOVEDRUNK
Epik High is back! The kings of many a high school karaoke sing-along party have returned with LOVEDRUNK, the title track of their latest album, Sleepless In ____. (No, I didn’t forget to finish that sentence, that’s literally the album.) It’s not an exaggeration to call this three-man group one of the biggest names in…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Katchup
Among the many, many idols who’ve attempted to spin off from from their (often dead or dying) parent groups, exceedingly few actually manage to successfully stand on their own. Katchup shows that Subin, formerly of Dal Shabet, is—at the very least—trying her hardest to do so. Subin (who seemingly now goes by the moniker DALsooobin—see…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Senorita
More Latin vibes in K-Pop is unquestionably good, as faint as they may be. (G)I-DLE is one of the newer girl groups on the block, and as they approach their one-year anniversary this coming May, their early hype has coalesced into a budding tour de force in Korean pop music. They already achieved one of…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Noir
The music video for Sunmi’s latest, Noir, is a biting critique of the image-obsessed Instagram influencer. This strikes me as ironic. Considering Sunmi’s pedigree in one of K-Pop’s biggest idol groups and an active participant in possibly one of the most unhealthily exterior-obsessed, nip-and-tuck-fueling industries in the world, it’s worth considering if this is all…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: I’m Not Laughing
Leessang was one of the greats of mid-to-late-2000s Korean hip-hop, and one listen to any of their title tracks is enough to make you fall into the well of their rhythmic and strangely powerful music. While many of Leessang’s later releases would abandon a lot of traditional hip-hop for a more mainstream, conventional sound (compare…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Love Options
Korean indie music is all well and good, but sometimes you’re in the mood to listen to slickly cheerful popstragavanzas injected straight into your veins. BESTie’s Love Options may be your best, ahem, option. BESTie was a relatively short-lived group, even by K-Pop standards; they debuted in 2013 and released their final songs in 2015.…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: So Sorry
In the middle of my first listen of So Sorry, I found myself wondering: how have I never heard of Joy o’clock before? For the first minute and a half of So Sorry’s runtime, it’s a fairly milquetoast piano-accompanied ballad, the kind that you might hear around episode 12 of a mediocre K-drama. Then: the…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Round 1
Do you want to hear a idol group named Dalmatian sing lyrics like “doggy dog woof woof woof”? Yes, yes, you do. In 2019, Dalmatian is a mere footnote in K-Pop history, but when they debuted in 2010 with Round 1, they garnered a bit of hype for not only this very catchy song but…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Maybe Blue
As winter starts to ebb to a slow and meandering close, I find myself drawn to more lo-fi, jazzy tracks than usual. And amidst my search for such lo-fi, jazzy tracks (because I spend far too much time scrolling through new K-Pop releases on YouTube), I happened upon Miyao’s Maybe Blue. It’s a short but…
By Seung Park -
K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Queen Of Diamonds
Pay close attention when you listen to Queen Of Diamonds for the first time, and see if you can catch the exact moment when this song transforms from a pedestrian indie piece into something more. (It’s not hard.) The Black Skirts, unlike what the band name would have you believe, is actually just one person:…
By Seung Park
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