Seung Park

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Lonely

When Sistar—the group behind a veritable cavalcade of summer hits like I Swear, Loving U and Shake It—announced they were hanging up their hats, fans didn’t quite expect this. Sister had never been known for their ballads, having a discography that ranged from summer-poppy to sultry-poppy to cheerful-poppy and back again. And yet, for their…

I’ve never played Resident Evil before, and by golly, that’s changing today. (No better day for it!) Come join Paul and me in the chat for some Halloween hijinks.

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Take Me To The Place

When Bekah, one of the original members of After School, became the latest victim of the group’s “graduation” concept, she released a surprise digital single that left her fans with not a dry eye in sight. I’ve railed long and hard against Pledis Entertainment’s treatment of their original girl group, After School, in several long-winded tirades.…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Goodbye

Welcome to Goodbye Songs Week, where we go through some of the most heart-rending and saddening goodbye songs from K-Pop groups whose numbers came up before their time. When Goodbye released in 2017—a full three years after 2NE1’s last album release, Crush—fans already knew what was a long time coming: 2NE1 was over. For three…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Cruel Fairy Tale

It isn’t often that listening to a K-Pop track makes you feel like you’ve accidentally stumbled into a tilted Victorian horror movie, but IU’s Cruel Fairy Tale does exactly that. IU’s Real+ album was a 2011 follow-up to her 2010 Real album and its breakout title track Good Day, which we’ve covered previously. It’s not…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Voodoo Doll

What if voodoo dolls came alive and turned into K-Pop idols? We’ve all had that dream, right? No? Just me? Okay, then. VIXX debuted in 2012 and is well-known for preferring a slightly darker, moodier side to their album concepts than most of their contemporary boy groups, which is well-represented here with Voodoo Doll While…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Bbi Ri Bba Bba

Halloween is nearly upon us, and for the rest of this week, I’ll be dropping some tracks that fit the mood. First up: this very-awkward-to-properly-Romanize song. (The English language’s lack of a hard “b” letter makes talking about K-Pop somewhat trying at times, and this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered a tongue-twister title thanks…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Nobody

Yours truly is easing back into things from a weeklong vacation, so let’s dip our toes back into the pool with a classic track that I already know backward and forward. And by “classic”, I’m obviously referring to the late 2000s, as that was the era that I first dove headfirst into this genre and…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Heartbreaker

Okay, I admit it: after listening to Lies over and over for yesterday’s column, I got sucked into a black hole of Big Bang’s music. After a journey through basically their entire discography, I arrived here: the song that put G-Dragon on the map. Heartbreaker was this Big Bang member’s big breakthrough solo debut, and…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Lies

I’ve used a lot of words to describe a lot of songs in this column, but I rarely call songs iconic—because words have meaning. Big Bang’s Lies is iconic. I can’t think of many songs that have withstood the test of time as well as 2007’s Lies. More than a decade after its release, it…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: All Night

Out of all former Sistar members, Soyou has probably been the most successful at striking out on her own, thanks to a robust pre-breakup solo and collaboration discography that set the baseline for her continuing success in K-Pop. The Latin/jazz inspiration in All Night is clear from its opening chords and makes me wish that…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: First Love

Does any song capture all of the shy, timid flutterings of a schoolyard crush as well as First Love does? I’m inclined to say no. Epitone Project is a one-man band under Kim Sae Jeong, who appears to have debuted around 2006 (as with most indie artists, the exact date is lost to history) and…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Bongsuki

Bossa Nova and Korean indie? Works better than you think. Rose Motel is an indie band that debuted in 2011. Bongsuki is part of their debut single album, You’ll Never Get Married Like That Bongsuki is notable for its lyrics, which were written in a Busan dialect instead of the standard Korean. As a result,…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Cider

Norazo has gone through some changes since the last time we featured them, but the central concept has remained the same: producing wacky, irreverent music couched in some truly addictive beats. Sprite-like beverages are known as cider (sa-ee-da) in Korea, and somewhere along the line, the word has come to mean something very specific in…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: How People Move

Get up and dance, because Akdong Musician’s How People Move is all about—you guessed it—dancing. Plus, it’s Friday. Do you really need an excuse? This brother-sister duo, stylized as AKMU, is mostly known for their acoustic pop, from which How People Move was their first significant departure. (I covered one of their acoustic pop examples,…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Love City

Nine Muses is one of the most mature-concept, refined girl groups active right now, so it wasn’t surprising to see them fit like a glove into Love City’s cosmopolitan pop-inspired music. 2017’s Love City is Nine Muses’ latest release at the time of this writing, after an exodus one year earlier that saw Hyuna, Minha…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Day By Day

While I normally try to link to official music videos whenever possible, today is an exception—because the music video for T-ara’s Day By Day is fucking 16 minutes long, and no one has time for that. I’ve linked to a dance version, which also doesn’t even start the song until a minute into the goddamn…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Lightsaber

Yes, that Star Wars—the one from a galaxy far, far away—made a K-Pop song. Lightsaber, a 2015 song by EXO, was released for the purposes of marketing Star Wars: The Force Awakens in Asian countries, where the intellectual property didn’t have as much pull as it does in America. (It still doesn’t, really; do a…

K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Together We Can

Idol groups don’t only promote cell phones and hair products. Sometimes, they produce entire songs for various PSAs, like BESTie did when they partnered with the Seoul police to release Together We Can Together We Can is a PSA against bullying, and schoolyard bullying in particular. This is a problem everywhere, but especially in South…

Introducing Kotaku Social, Our New Twitter Account

Twitter can be bad; that’s why we’ve decided to make it better, or at least a little more fun. We’re excited to launch our new Twitter account: Kotaku Social On Kotaku Social, there will be zero subtweeting of any kind. There will be no filtered selfies (unless I accidentally tweet from the Kotaku account, which…