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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Love Love Love
It’s still the holiday season, right? Right??? I’ve yet to encounter a song and music video that is as good-cheer-spreadable like After School’s 2010 end-of-year holiday track, Love Love Love. This Christmas-themed song is also a window back to a time before Pledis Entertainment’s current crop of artists like Seventeen, NU’EST and Pristin dominated the…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Sometimes I Want To Hug You Like Crazy
Autumn Vacation is a two-member Korean indie group active since 2009, and Sometimes I Want To Hug You Like Crazy (that might be the longest-ever title in the history of this column) is from their first eponymous album. The vocalist absolutely makes this track; her name is Im Soo Jin (stage name Cinnamon), and prior…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: You Are My Destiny
While modern K-Pop fans will most likely recognize HaHa (full name Ha Dong Hoon) for his work on Korean comedy television, he actually started out his career in Korean entertainment as an artist. And not just any artist—a reggae artist. With 2007’s You Are My Destiny, sampled from Ben E. King’s Stand By Me, listeners…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: RBB
Wait, wasn’t Halloween two months ago? If your first reaction after listening to RBB was “gee, this is so different from their last title track,” that’s because Red Velvet has regularly switched between polarized concepts since their inception. In fact, their group name itself is based on this idea: “Red”, which stands for their colorful…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Fairy Tale
If a Korean pop song could ever be featured in a Disney animated film, this would be it. Kim Dong Ryul is a veteran of the Korean ballad pop scene, having debuted back in 1994 and dabbled in many sub-genres of soft, soulful easy-listening music since then. Fairy Tale is his latest, and a collaboration…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Monsieur
I’ve been on an indie kick recently if you haven’t noticed. I personally blame Haruna Stella Jang, who officially debuted in 2014, is an interesting study. Her musical style is greatly influenced by 90s artists like Yoon Jong Shin and Jung Jae Hyung, by her own admission, and yet, her latest track is an eighties-city-pop…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: On You
Growing up, I played the piano. Maybe that’s why I can’t resist a solid piano opening. Sweetch is another one of those artists that I only found after a deep, deep dive into obscure Korean indies on YouTube, much like how I stumbled upon Haruna a few days ago. His discography is mainly easy-listening and…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: You’re The Best
MAMAMOO occupies an interesting position in the K-Pop market. They’re not quite billed as an idol group, like, say, Red Velvet or TWICE. At the same time, though, they’re not quite indie, either. They occupy the space in between, and they’re damn good at filling it. We’ve met some of MAMAMOO’s members before, in solo…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Lost N Found
We haven’t listened to good, old-fashioned idol pop in a while, haven’t we? Lovelyz is an eight-member girl group that debuted in 2014 under Woollim Entertainment (the same agency behind Infinite), which makes them the same “age” as Red Velvet, Akdong Musician, GOT7 and WINNER. While Lovelyz hasn’t quite reached the level of popularity that…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: The Space Between
I love it when K-Pop music videos turn into episodes of K-drama lite (barring, say, 20-minute-long monstrosities), and the video for The Space Between is one of the best I’ve watched. It’s a classic K-drama plot condensed into the running time of an average pop song, but it’s got everything you’d expect: a screwball mix-up,…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Thank U Soooo Much
If the Dragonball Z scouter cameo wasn’t enough reason for Yubin’s just-released Thank U Soooo Much to jump the line for a feature, its gorgeous 80’s-inspired music surely is. Thank U Soooo Much (hereby referred to as TUSM) is Yubin’s second solo release, following Lady which came out in June of this year. Even the…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: So
Jaurim released a new album for the first time in five years, and I am here for it. Jaurim, by Jaurim, is their tenth studio album and the first since 2013’s Goodbye, Grief. From our previous musings on this uniquely eccentric band, you know that they’re one of Korea’s most adaptive and versatile performers; their…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: A Long Dream
SE SO NEON is one of the most interesting Korean indie artists active today. Just look at this gorgeous music video, which is reason enough to feature it for today’s pick. The music video for A Long Dream was created by German-Japanese artist Hoji Tsuchiya, via a painstakingly labor-intensive stop-motion process. The simplistic visuals complement…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: The Red Shoes
Swing, baby, swing! I’ve previously mentioned my love of saxophones, and that love most definitely extends to big band music—and when that big band comes with an unashamed lifting of early-twentieth-century aesthetics and choreography, IU’s The Red Shoes has practically got me groveling at its feet. We’ve been (slowly but steadily) hitting the major points…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: First Snow
Here in New York, home of the Kotaku mothership, we just got our first dusting of snow last week. (In November!) It was a fair bit more than a dusting, actually; it was the kind of snow that makes people stop whatever you were doing and gaze at the flurry for a few seconds, lost…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Honey Bee
I have a thing about songs with saxophone riffs. And that thing is: I can’t resist them. Honey Bee was a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between three singers from three very different girl groups: Luna from f(x), Hani from EXID, and Solar from MAMAMOO. Produced in 2017, the song—produced by Park Keun Tae—was an exercise in making…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Closer
When you’ve delved into K-Pop as deeply as I have (to be clear, this is not a brag), YouTube sometimes suggests artists, and songs, that you had no idea ever existed. This is how I found Haruna. I knew nothing about Haruna before yesterday. I still know basically nothing; English-language sites turn up zilch, and…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Mistake
Drug Restaurant (yes, that is their name) is a four-member Korean indie band that is perhaps most well-known for its lead vocalist, Jung Joon Young, who rose to fame through Superstar K, a popular music survival program. This eponymous album and their title track, Mistake, was their second album—and their first since they changed their…
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Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Blue Moon
There are two instances of Blue Moon as a proper noun. One is a resoundingly mediocre beer that college seniors buy when they take their first steps into microbreweries. The other is this. Rest assured, this is not resoundingly mediocre. Kyungri has been one of the most popular and most well-known of all of the…
By Seung Park -
Kotaku EastK-Pop Pick Of The Day: Downpour
How often do you see a new idol group that debuts with an expiration date already set in stone, even before their first performance? With I.O.I, that’s exactly what happened. This girl group was the product of a television show called Produce 101, and the premise went something like this: a bunch of agencies would…
By Seung Park
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