If your exposure to K-Pop so far has only been through title tracks and their accompanying music videos, you’re missing out on some premium quality pop. Here’s an example of what I mean.
B1A4 designated Sweet Girl as their title track for their sixth extended play album in 2015. The song is... fine. It’s a good track, the music video is good, it’s a chill ballad. It’s not exceptional, though.
Do you know what is exceptional from that album? The second song from the tracklist: You Are A Girl, I Am A Boy. This incredibly uplifting, perfect-for-summertime song was buried beneath Sweet Girl during the album’s promotional period, which is a crying shame.
It’s a pattern that has been repeated often enough in K-Pop for me to coin a phrase for it: the second-track syndrome. Orange Caramel’s Milkshake is the best goddamn song from their Lipstick album, yet it gets short shrift stuck between everything else. 2NE1's Go Away, the second song in their To Anyone album, was far better than Can’t Nobody, the song that got all the promotional love.
So if you get just one thing out of this series, just remember: listen to the whole album, instead of just watching the music video and calling it a day. More often than not, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.