Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” arrived to the world in 2001, one of these eternally shimmering pop gems that gets better with each listen. Perhaps the most striking element of it, to this day, is Minogue’s breathlessness as she exalts the infatuation she has for a lover, juxtaposed against icy synths and drum loops. Her head is a place of pristine white, the inside of a computer, the clean surface of a Mac, and the only program that runs – its operating system – is the infatuation. Minogue’s “La la la”s are girlish, but removed, almost robotic.

When Taemin interpolated this classic twenty years later for “Criminal”, the “la la la” becomes an incantation, a beckoning. Taemin is removed, too, but wherever he is – with those cold synths and far-off bass – is a place that is decidedly dark, but not fully black. It is as barren as an OS, but it is not as plasticky. I hear the sonic equivalent of giant, empty halls that have no use except for weekly bazaars. It is not a place one would like to be at night, lit only by fires set in the trash, where creatures could come out: not people on the brink of poverty, perhaps with a penchant of the violent, but actual creatures that may be human-shaped but are most certainly not. It is in that synth that lashes like a whip, the cascading arpeggios in the chorus, in Taemin’s breathy, ever-distant falsetto. But then it comes out, the human, the plea to be free, in the last chorus. It is a chilling piece of pop music. We do not ever get the sense he escapes from the creatures. We get the sense that the person calmly intoning “la la la” amidst vocal samples of police calls and journalists rushing to report an emergency is the same person that traps Taemin in the final chorus. We get the sense maybe Taeemin is both creature and human.

Throughout his solo career, Taemin has dealt in contrasts and contradictions. There’s catholic undertones in there – say, a devil and an angel – but not always: sometimes all that it is is a simple contrast of black and white (“Danger”, blue and yellow in “Day and Night”) or casual and formal clothing (“2 Kids”). There’s Kanye-style masks sometimes. But while plenty of idols have various costume changes, it’s as though Taemin inhabits a different person with them. There’s a Taemin that will be on in a way any performer is “on”, and then there will be a Taemin that is more on, so on that it registers to us as off; or he is actually “off”: absent, someplace nobody can reach him. These Taemins are forever entwined, within kissing distance but never meeting one another.

He will wear or be in chains and ropes, or wear clothing that has fringes, but it never strikes me with sexual want as it would have with, say, Wonho. Wonho will show a high-end car that doubles as his sexual drive; Taemin will show the same car within three shots completely wrecked. And the music isn’t sexy either; it uses strings or synths, ominous and sensual. These are songs that communicate, well, danger, yes, but also desire that veers to the desperate. They’re songs that communicate a certain kind of command with complete remove. They typically use a second vocal track, either with him in lower register (“WANT”, “Criminal”) or a female vocalist (“Drip Drop”, “Advice”). Only once has it cloaked Taemin in so much autotune (“Danger”) that it registers as robotic for most of the song. But even there: that singular vocal in the bridge: “You know everything, ooh baby yeah / You move me and control me again”

Since 2014, Taemin always seemed to communicate that this divide was meant to convey something that images and speech couldn’t. The rigid dancing versus the dramatic singing. Good versus bad. He is divided, but over what? The manifestation of these divisions – on and more on, on and off – were only striking insofar as they seem irreconcilable, be it on set, the different cameras used, or with the way Taemin carries himself. But good and evil only seems irreconcilable in teenage years; Taemin carried it at least until his late twenties, even splitting his last album before enlistment into two: Never Gonna Dance Again. But as the final comeback of the enlistment, Taemin released “Advice”, a song that shows an unmasked and unhinged and masked and even more unhinged Taemin. He crashes a car because he can. He will stand in the plains, arms stretched out, white paint looking like bird shit, and look like the messiah he’s praised in IDEA only a couple months before.

The thought that maybe Taemin is against the idol industry writ large, or what it makes of the people that work in them, is a proposition that makes sense at the beginning. After all, he wouldn’t be the only one within his group to do so — that teammate Jonghyun’s music came out from the label and the system it did seems nothing short of a minor miracle sometimes. (“Pretty Boy” is about idols versus fans/the public, essentially.) But what Taemin is doing on his titles, from music video to music video, seems too elaborate, too ornate for that. This is personal, even if he can’t say what it is, both in the sense of him not knowing what it is and hiding it from the world. Two and a half years later, he’s back with “Guilty”, and what I see and hear here is a man who now knows the answer to what he wants to express. Here is a man who knows that good and bad has existed in him, as one, and always will — and that there’s trauma underneath all of it.

Before we reach to “Guilty”, I must highlight the Jonghyun-penned and Kai-assisted “Pretty Boy” from Taemin’s debut ACE. Taemin sounds positively aggressive in this one as he shouts the title over and over, a palpable force in the chorus especially. The brass gives the song a militaristic slant. “I may seem nice and I may seem soft, but that’s all a part of your imagination that’s over my head,“ he belts: a declaration of identity. On a Blue Night episode just before ACE was released, Jonghyun sounds especially warm talking about it: “It’s a song I like because I wrote it.” (You and me both.) He asked Taemin what he’d like to tell the world, and packaged it into a song. Rumors, interference, worry – all these things surrounded him, and all these things he wanted to escape. Jonghyun is bothered by how Taemin is seen – delicate, girly – and what he sees: a man (“a real man”, he says with a laugh) with perseverance.

The delicate and girly stereotypes essentially boil down to physique; Taemin debuted at just fourteen in SHINee and famously had no singing lines on “Replay”. But he could dance with hardness and fluidity both, features oft-mimicked but never surpassed even fifteen years later. In 2010, he’s worn his hair very, very long for SHINee’s “Lucifer”, and then again two years later in “Sherlock”, hiding his eyes and making his dainty frame look even more dainty. He’s always smiley. He’s not muscly. If you’ve stuck around in RPS shipper circles enough, or are plain fujoshi, you know what you see: a bottom, a submissive, an uke. (And Internet War? Jonghyun’s hand on Taemin’s head, pulling him in? You already know.) If you have preconceived notions about what maketh “man”, Taemin registers as someone outside of these lines, whether one chooses to call it “gay” or “girlish”.

You can see Taemin’s acceptance and also rebuttal of this image over his solo career. “MOVE” had him embrace his feminine side, but it was impressive not because Taemin swayed his body just so and was constantly in rain, but because it was juxtaposed with shots where Taemin is surrounded by women, looking stereotypically masculine. Taemin blows up smoke and he is seen with a reverse cross in “WANT”, but he also dances in front of his own photograph that he never looks at.

Mostly, he wants the camera on him dancing. Watching his videos, I always get the sense what he wants is to only dance, without any burden. His Japanese music videos get at that best, as does “Drip Drop”. In the latter, the only part that allows him to really sing his heart out is ironically the same moment where he sings: “We’re dancing”, each syllable in the original Korean hefty.

“Guilty” concedes that this could never happen. For a change, the song itself doesn’t sound detached from the vocal takes. It’s as dramatic as Taemin’s vocals are in his best songs. There are Biblical allusions in this one again – guilt, yes, as well as the final judgement, and who can forget the apple that he asks the other person to bite into? – but the song hides its pure idea of loving someone else and packages it with evil that he is not beckoned into this time, but beckons himself. Taemin sounds at home both when he yearns for the guilt and crime of loving the other person and when he asks the other person to lose themselves to make the love easy. His vocals are soaring higher than ever before, and the control and wicked ease that permeates “Advice” is all over this one too.

The music video, though, cinches things for good. He sports longer hair, reminiscent of the “Lucifer” and “Sherlock” eras, healthy biceps, and long jean skirts. It is not necessarily girlish, but uniquely Taemin. Following a trailer in which there was a vague Battle Royale-feeling to it, in which Taemin is at a boarding school that facilitates violence, the music video and the choreography goes a step further – all the evil that Taemin has seen battle within him, as evidenced by the hand that crawls up inside of his shirt, caressing, controlling his jaw. He sees other people pull at him, but then they’re gone, and his hand is still moving to his neck, as if he was trying to kill himself. And in the second verse, he is killing others, sporting a crown of feathers, far too fashionable to be made by one person and yet looking like a child’s attempt to crown himself king. In a crucial bridge, we see Taemin with an inhaler, clinging on a knee so he mustn’t partake in the violence he sees. With his high note entering the final chorus, he is setting everything on fire. The violence is cyclical. Again, he is the person that crashes the car. He is the king of the battlefield.

The pretty boy has grown up, and he’s taken in all that the world has taught him. He is in an empty hall that has one use at most. Lit by fires coming from trashcans, there are creatures lurking about. That is the realm that Taemin commands as his own. He’s done dividing himself trying to explain — creating, in the process, pop masterpieces of his own.

Life has a way of turning the sincere to the ironic, one way or another. In the late 90s, DJs playing in London clubs wanted to bring a local genre back to its locality: UK garage, which had gone popular nationwide, was close to losing its touch to jungle, and 2-Step was an effort to steer the boat back into the right direction again, i.e, remain local. The genre title is a technical one: removing the second and fourth kick from the four-on-the-floor pulse, thus taking the speed out of the speed garage it originated from, but keeping its drugged-out feel intact. Simon Reynolds, in his 1999 Wire article ”Feminine Pressure”, describes it as “Timbaland on E”. Timbaland, or more specifically his first muse Aaliyah, has been a great source of fascination for these DJs: one of the more popular garage remixes has been “Stone Cold”, the sub-zero version of 1996’s “One in a Million”.

The melody, the female vocals, and pop underpinnings make this one, well, girlier than drum’n’bass and jungle. For the 2-Step DJs of old, “for the girls” was a badge of pride. For the garage listeners of today, hailing from all over the world, the girlishness is a given. Close to thirty years since its inception, UK garage — and, in particular, 2-Step — is uniquely poised to take over the mainstream beyond the United Kingdom, and the unlikely star PinkPantheress is its catalyst. In the world of K-Pop, NewJeans made UK Garage their sonic calling, following PinkPantheress’s skittishness and introverted steps closely. But in the case of K-Pop, UK Garage never really left once it entered its omnivorous catalogue — in 2015!

The following is a vague retrospective of UK Garage (UKG for short) in K-Pop. It will not touch every single K-Pop track that has been described as UK Garage, because you’ll come to find that, taken out of their context (their minis/albums) these songs are all of one genre and naturally all sound alike. I also excluded some forebearers and cousins of this genre, unless they had UKG elements to it; STAYC’s “So Bad”, for instance, is a drum & bass-indebted song, but has no garage element to it. I will, however, talk about the ones I deem inductive to the way the K-Pop music industry has handled this subgenre; more specifically, I wondered, what paved the road to a song like “Ditto”? That also meant touching on other UK Garage (and R&B!) tracks that were happening at the same time to really give the full picture — after all, K-Pop is never complete in its own, and always requires the context of other genres in other languages, primarily English.

Lastly — the most important part — this will stop at “Ditto”, the moment UK Garage fully made it to the K-Pop consciousness. Its impact is current; making a retrospective of the present while it’s still developing seems nonsensical to me.

Without further ado, let’s go back to a decade ago…

Disclosure — Stimulation

released: June 3, 2013

English siblings Guy and Howard Lawrence brought a glossy sensibility to a genre that was long past its mainstream moment on this side cut of their revelatory record Settle, chopping and screwing a diva vocal into repeating “Stimulation!” over and over. The skipping kicks blend together beautifully with the Lawrence brothers need for speed, keeping tension throughout with increasing clicks and a warm bass grounding it all underneath. Though it’s firmly a house track, this wouldn’t sound too out of place with the kind of pop of the Internet — one that is genre-agnostic, repetitive to the point of hypnotizing, subtle yet subtly engaging. Settle was received with rave reviews and good charting positions; and it set the table for a brief resurgence of UK Garage.

SHINee — View

released: May 18, 2015

It would take two more years for anyone to pick up on the sound Disclosure started in K-Pop, but it ultimately makes sense that SM brought it to K-Pop and that SHINee were the ones to do it. The boy group, initially conceived as something of the “weird” younger brother of their major, imperial seniors TVXQ and Super Junior, has dabbled with electronic beats since at least 2008’s autotuned drama “Forever or Never”, they eventually reached a fever pitch of digitization with 2010’s “Lucifer” and spent most of 2013 in the world of dubstep (”Why so Serious”, “Everybody”) and fizzy electro pop (“Dream Girl”). After wrapping up a world tour in 2014, their fourth album View enlisted the producing team LDN Noise for the summery, clubby title track that sounded deceptively close to garage… in the verses, anyway, as the chorus drops into house and to icy temperatures, with vocals takes that are flat and unaffected, lost in the own trance of its waters. With an obvious tip of the hat to Disclosure’s Settle along the way, “View” marked the stylistic beginning of UK Garage in K-Pop.

SHINee returned to garage-adjacent sounds a year later on their fifth album 1 of 1 with the exhilarating opener “Prism” and the dramatic “Shift”.

f(x) — 4 Walls

released: October 27, 2015

Girls’ Generation’s junior group, f(x), were the female counterpart of SHINee. They, too, had delved into electronic music since their debut, practically prophesizing the hyperpop movement with the seminal 2010 single “NU ABO”. For their fourth album, 4 Walls, they also went UKG with the exact same producing team. Unlike “View”, though, “4 Walls” is notably closer to the origins of the genre (save the bridge, which was indebted to deep house). The members float over the song with a mysterious (mysteric, as they call it) grace, witness and perpetrator to the supernatural happening in the music video. The mix of human fallibility — the way member Krystal’s vocals stretch out to hit the high note — and a quasi-melisma that shows no emotion, this song would prophesize how girl groups tackled the sound: girlish, but icy.

NCT 127 — Switch

released: July 7, 2016

SM’s boygroup project of infinite members in a single group has, famously, backfired in its conception. But in 2016, it not only seemed possible but was audibly present in a track like “Switch”, billed as a bonus track on the first NCT unit featuring rookie members (two of them, Doyoung and Johnny, would end up joining NCT 127 a couple months later). Their UK Garage take is notable in that, unlike SHINee and f(x), it is much more ragged at the edges, practically metallic the way those drums press uncomfortably against the ear. Key member Doyoung carries the song with a lightness and human-ness of his vocals that, within the NCT universe, signalled the single human in a big, neo world.

LOONA / Odd Eye Circle — Uncover

released: November 2, 2017

The second subunit of the gargantuan project that was once Loona sought to differentiate itself from their pleasant, 90s R&B-indebted sister group Loona 1/3. That meant going much more electronic and processed than 1/3 did, singing with coldness and rarely ever allowing the warmth to seep in (or singing with so much processing that it was hard to distinguish between Kim Lip, Jinsoul and Choerry on the track “LOONATIC”). For “Uncover”, a track on their repackaged EP Max & Match, the three members sound coy, almost consistently using their upper register, as the synths behind them are murky and the beats simultaneously analogue (claps, thin hi-hats) and utterly digital (bouncy bleeps, ticks). The main conceit is that incredible synth that stretches thin near the end, jagged and rough. Their vocal melody pushes this more to conventional K-Pop territory, but it’s not hard to see the the line between a song like this and “4 Walls”, as both these tracks are intrinsically interested in the contrast of the girl — floaty and gossamer — and the deceptively soft, unforgivingly mechanic beat.

SF9 — Now Or Never

released: July 31, 2018

Three years into their debut, SF9 had cycled through a great many of styles and sounds — not a particularly uncommon thing in K-Pop, but in a time in which the expectations slowly shifted to possessing a “core sound”, such identity searches could prove risky to fans that wanted to stay and like the group. “Now or Never” was the lead of their fifth EP, and the difference between this and an “O Sole Mio” showed clear as day what had made them struggle for so long: the songs had previously not fit the group before .”Now or Never” uses rigid beats, which allowed the humanity and emotion of the vocalists to shine through better, and the otherwise cold intonation (”jileosseo”/”I did it” doubling as “jealous” is a great application of Konglish) to be imbued with meaning. The verses boom and click their way through it, making “Now or Never” proof that the connection to Disclosure was still alive and intact with its house leanings and stringy piano line. SF9, for their part, returned to the winning combination in 2020’s “Good Guy” and, after a particularly successful performance on Mnet’s tedious program Kingdom the following year, the blend of house, garage, and casual elegance stuck with SF9.

Erika de Casier — Intimate - Club Mix

released: May 15, 2019

Erika de Casier’s debut record Essentials sounded in many ways like a throwback to one of R&B’s most sensual eras: that of the late 90s, in which whisper-singers like Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, and Sade Adu made their quiet authority over sex jams. Their melisma and deceptively cool singing pushed against the idea that someone like Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men brought about earlier in the decade, that of a singer that had to belt to get a point across. “Intimate” is indebted to Aaliyah in its slow, Timbaland-esque production that skitters and bubbles behind her, while de Casier’s own vocals dip into a high-pitched, breathless territory of a Janet Jackson. It makes sense, then, to bookend the album with a “club remix” of this track, as its girlish, shy delivery would be amplified by house beats and faster kicks and prove a canny understanding of the late 1990s, an era in which de Casier was growing up. The club mix goes a little into drum’n’bass with those rolling hi-hats at the last beat, but this would prove a canny song to what would eventually take the world over by storm.

The Boyz — Salty

released: February 10, 2020

UK Garage had stopped being a moment that belonged to title tracks by 2020. But The Boyz’s main fare and subsequent success is the intertextual quality of their music; they always overtly or covertly reference other (and older) K-Pop groups whilst raising it to today’s music and production standards. So it only makes sense that they would also feature an UKG track on their first full length Reveal with the B-side “Salty”. But unlike SF9 and SHINee’s approaches, “Salty” is warmer on the vocal side, processed to the point of light fuzziness, as if it was cotton. Rapper Sunwoo even cedes to a particularly lovely moment on vocals in the second verse, never once breaking the song in its tempo. As this song was also performed on various music stages, what originally began as a tight but lighthearted performance eventually morphed to a joyous, freespirited dance that fans would call “cute”.

WJSN (Cosmic Girls) — Pantomime

released: June 9th, 2020

After finding their footing with 2016’s “Secret”, WJSN (u-ju seon-yeo or Cosmic Girls in English) made a well-liked girl group trope their sonic calling card: that of the magical girl. The way this is done is through the dramatic vocal melodies with strings and twinkling melodies swirling behind. It’s a way to hone in on the feminine aspect of a given group — but while one might think that hearing it just once will reveal all its tricks, here comes a track like “Pantomime” off their eighth EP Neverland, on which the wistful vocals meet a match with skittering beats and bouncing beats. Even leader Exy’s rap has something of an enchanting quality to it. But far from it simply registering as cute, “Pantomime” remains beguiling and even dark as the bridge completely sweeps the proverbial ground under the listeners’ feet as the beats take over for a flawless switch up.

PinkPantheress — Pain

released: January 30, 2021

PinkPantheress was a film student in 2020 when she was working on little song snippets here and there — her singing was more an experiment of how a topline would work with the UK garage and drum’n’bass beats she was making (it must be noted that drum’n’bass — from songs to compilations — rack up to a million views on Youtube, where the genre found a new, fresh footing). The first one she posted on TikTok was called “Just A Waste” and hit over 500 thousand likes. On her upload of her song “Pain”, another early viral track, she writes on YouTube: “spotify is super tempting but as a lot of my songs are beats i’ve sampled, i’m worried they’ll be taken down or not allowed ☹️” As it turns out, though, she got the sample to Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 hit “Flowers” cleared — and the rest remains history still in the making. With the skittish, almost pensive beat, “Pain” clocks at one minute and thirty seconds and manages to picture an intimate, introverted moment of watching an on-again, off-again lover go on a run. But PinkPantheress has already realized that it won’t go anywhere, and the simple, “la-la-la-la, la-la” melody brings to mind a visceral image of a girl in the corner, inspecting her shoes, and trying not to cry. This is the the introduction of an introverted girl’s big small world.

Kwon Eunbi — Glitch

released: April 4, 2022

The leader of Mnet project group I*ZONE immediately sought to differentiate herself from the girl group once it ended by throwing in electro swing for the chorus of her debut “Door”. For her second lead “Glitch” and its corresponding EP, Colors, her theatrical approach yet rigid vocal tone found its natural match with the icy beat presented to her, one that seemed to breathe with and through her, whether it’s timid twinkles, the telltale skittering and shifting of the kicks, or the strings that swell on the pre-chorus, or the kaleidoscopic chorus that makes a brilliantly shining centerpiece to it all. “Glitch” is daring and tries out so much that it almost gets lost within its own finely-tuned machinery — Eunbi all but disappears at the very end of it — and marks the very end of K-Pop’s curious tinkering between the girl and the machine. What a fitting end it makes, though, because Eunbi’s faint, airy voice suggests that the girl is in the machine: both the glitch and perfect pitch, as she sings it.

NewJeans — Ditto

released: December 2, 2022

The initial EP, released in a blitz, positioned Hybe subsidiary label ADOR’s girl group NewJeans as purveyors of late 90s to early 00s R&B, when quietly commanding vocalists met up with lurching, skipping, glitchy technology. Their world was about boys: wanting their attention, seeing them as chemical hype boys, being hurt by them, offering them cookies of … some kind. The second lead single — the first comeback in K-Pop spheres — then wasn’t exactly a left swerve, but that is exactly what it felt like. Here was a group that went from sounding quietly confident to majestically heartbroken, and they did so while keeping their slightly electronic R&B ideals intact. “Ditto” owes just about everything to PinkPantheress, from the short runtime to the skittish garage beats, but the emoting at play here is also reminiscent of the quiet control that Erika de Casier exerted in Essentials. Stacking hooks upon hooks and never overstaying its welcome, “Ditto” is supremely uninterested whether girls were trapped in the machine. Instead, the machine became a natural extension of the girl’s emotions, her introversion, and the things she could never say to the boy she likes.

And sure enough, “Ditto” became ground zero for everything to follow in the K-Pop girlgroup sphere after that.

Depeche Mode is a pop band, not a rock band. That being said, their version of pop — dark, cold, and soul-scraping — aligned more with the goth sensibilities of the time than peak MTV pop. They started out as part of the UK new wave that went away from the anti-corporate ideas of Sex Pistols and the like, but soon their vision of synthesized pop music from Construction Time Again on would make the cold, removed demo of “Don’t You Want Me” sound positively cute. After the departure of Vince Clarke, Alan Wilder joining, and Martin Gore taking over songwriting duties, the Basildon, Essex outfit found its footing. Gore’s keyboards (and, later, guitar) were matched with Alan Wilder’s penchant for instrumentation, Andy Fletcher’s keyboards, and were given shape and melancholia with Dave Gahan’s booming vocals. That classic line-up lived for almost a decade until Wilder left in 1995.

Between Construction Time Again and Violator, Depeche Mode made like the kind of pop music where you instantly know why it cannot ever rule the world, except, for a brief moment, when Violator matched the world’s ideas of what pop music should be. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for this kind of fucked-up pop music, in which obsession is tantamount to love and being in your head is the default mode of walking into the world. (And, probably, drugs.) As such, they have been needle dropped over the years on a variety of shows, from Gossip Girl all the way to Cocaine Bear. Three songs in particular pop up most often. And, hilariously, enough, one immortal pop single that new generations rightfully rediscover if the “Viral Hits Deutschland” Spotify playlist is anything to go by. Is this our outlet for a need of darkness, the acknowledgement things are uniquely fucked up? Maybe. It could be… if the most needle-dropped song wasn’t their bright moment of light.

Just Can’t Get Enough

from Speak & Spell, 1981

Their second most-streamed (on Spotify) and easily most-needledropped song, “Just Can’t Get Enough” only shares one thing in common with the rest of Depeche Mode: Dave Gahan singing on it. A pre-Martin Gore song — this one, like all songs of the debut record Speak & Spell, is penned by Vincent Clarke — “Just Can’t Get Enough” feels like the MTV-fueled Billboard number one that never was, with its springy synths, quaint keyboards, peppy attitude, and the whole group singing the main conceit of this song: “I just can’t get enough, I just can’t get enough”. Easy to see why Cocaine Bear makes use of this one, then, as the bear rips another person apart. Lyrically, it details an almost comical exaggeration of infatuation: the idea of walking down the street, holding hands, and meeting up becoming an addiction. The lover becomes an angel, a rainbow, a light, and you just can’t get enough. It’s the type of featherlight pop song that is enjoyable enough on shuffle, easily distillable for a soundtrack, and unmemorable enough to really stand out when a film is running in the background. It’s also got so little to do with what else Depeche Mode would go on to do musically whilst also, funnily enough, keep in line with everything else thematically: the idea of love as something transcendent and almost oppressive.

That debut performance on Live Swap Shop is quite the adorable sight. The suits. The lack of guitars. Vince Clarke on it. Dave Gahan never looking at the camera, except sometimes, and it always seems like an accident. I just can’t get enough.

Never Let Me Down Again

from Music for the Masses, 1987

Depeche Mode hit something of a stride starting with Black Celebration, where their music went even darker and more introverted than the previous Construction Time Again. But Music for the Masses — a title that was intended as a tongue-in-cheek joke, since the band figured it was “nothing” like music for the actual masses in 1987 — went even darker somehow, escaping the oppressive city to the open field, where everything was even more bleak. With the processed guitars and the drums setting the scene, and the piano lending it something of a melancholy touch, Gahan’s vocals sweep over it all, sounding bored, wired, and frightened all at once. The lyrics are about nothing — something about a ride with a best friend, who may also be a lover, or drugs — which means that they’re also about everything, about this mood that Depeche Mode are so incredible at: the moment just before devastation hits. And on “Never Let Me Down Again”, it sounds gargantuan with that finale of horns and choirs joining in to the ride with the best friend. What really seals the deal is Martin Gore at the very end, acting as a counter to Gahan, floating over all of it not unlike how disassociation feels.

“Never Let Me Down Again”’s first line alone probably helped its appearance on HBO smash hit The Last Of Us, on which Ellie and her father must survive in a post-apocalyptic world with zombies. She is, indeed, taking a ride with her best friend. In its needle drop, the pianos kick in just as the thunder reveals a collapsed building overgrown with ivy. Another recent approach was by Sam Levinson’s show Euphoria, on which in its second season “Never Let Me Down Again” was used for a montage where the lyrics are somewhat taken literally (and homoerotically), while striking the mood of turmoil all the same.

Personal Jesus

first single of Violator, 1990

Reach out and touch faith. To hear Martin Gore sing this on the acoustic version, all hushed, you get the sense that the faith isn’t embodied by himself. “Flesh and bone by the telephone” — that is what he’s trying to reach, so he can preach the message and make the listener a believer. He’s merely a messenger to an intimate faith as opposed to the grand scale of both cult and religion. And though all this may play out on the phone, the simple guitar grounds it to real emotions, and the sensations tied into it. The bluesy guitar emulates the type of Americana that non-Americans collectively imagine: one of desert and sparseness, in which the anonymous metropolitan life is unthinkable. Jesus, here, isn’t a vague figure that is uninterested in the metropolitan bustle. He is a man, and he is right there for you. Your priest is on the landline, a visible, tangible thing.

That hushed reverence is not the song that became the single. The final version of “Personal Jesus”, their third most streamed song on Spotify, David Gahan’s majestic baritone sweeps over the topline in a way Gore could never go to. Gahan is not the messenger, he is the personal Jesus. And he’s right there, on the phone, as a digital being who will be put into the test. The benchmark of all the confessions does not faze him, nor the skittish beats flittering about on top of the guitar line. This Jesus is metropolitan: so big, so forgiving, that the act of forgiveness is tantamount to rapture — culminating to the masterful bridge, with its pumping breaths (itself gloriously related to the coda of an earlier single, “Master and Servant”, of 1984’s Some Great Reward — and aren’t we all Servants to a faceless God?) Like another one of Gore’s songs on Violator that went from intimate to gargantuan, the hook is both in the monster chorus and the topline that is repeated over and over. It isn’t all that surprising, then, to see this one be picked up as a needle drop — it’s not as popular as Enjoy The Silence. One currently on Youtube shorts with 2,4 million streams is a faked edit of Jodie Foster dancing to it on 1988 movie The Accused, and a genuine one from last year happens in the opening episode of Netflix show Russian Doll’s second season. To the ears of 2023, even the current version of “Personal Jesus” manages to sound quaint, almost analogue, to the rest of our lives. The Stargate remix tries to digitize matters, but loses all of its reach and retains none of its faith as a result. The Internet has no God for us.

Enjoy the Silence

second single of Violator, 1990

Speaking of “not the song that became the single”: imagine you working with a track that is a somber little affair, just you and the harmonium organ, a haunted piece of music about the violence of words that ends with the title: “Enjoy the silence…” followed by silence. It’s practically gothic. Like many of Gore’s songs at the time (and later into the 90s), “Enjoy the Silence” feels withdrawn and dark without reveling in it, as though the darkness was simply a necessary byproduct; and to hear him sing it with that quivering vocal tone of his, that feeling of a nervous breakdown that makes so many Depeche Mode songs great shines through in a stunning clarity. The silence isn’t just something to be enjoyed — it’s a need, one that Gore spends a lot of time writing its opposite about. After a betrayal of vows, and pain and pleasure (intense feelings!) hidden behind words, he tells his little girl that all that is wanted and needed is… here… in his arms. Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s drugs.

So here is this gothic song that you made and then you hear what producer Flood and your bandmate Alan Wilder did to it — a dance tune. (This is, essentially, the real-life version of the ”Can y’all watch this [creepy haunted song] while I go out for a smoke” meme.) Paradoxically enough, it absolutely complements what the song is trying to get at: the absence of words bringing joy and peace. The guitar lick — a last-minute addition from Gore — is nothing short of iconic, capturing the gothic feeling of the original demo whilst also being the catchiest part of the song. Meanwhile, the dance elements — the springy beat, the synths slicing the air like lightsabers, and the horns at the end — give the song a cold feeling, but without ever going outright icy. In a beautiful reinterpretation by Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, the instrumental passages that seem taken outright from a Meteora session, crash down with fervor and seem to underscore how violent words can really get.

And, of course, Gahan’s voice: booming with majesty (with a beautiful assist from Gore in the chorus), intoning with a gentleness and patience as he speaks of the broken vows. Written down like this, the song seems ripe with contradictions — in the first place, that title doesn’t exactly fit this busy and loud a song. But not only does this add to the enduring legacy of the song, it also speaks, in a roundabout way, to its origins. Its defiant royalty is only exacerbated in the music video by Anton Corbijn, on which Dave Gahan — who felt like an idiot doing so — wanders in a robe and a crown through quasi-technicolor landscapes with a foldable chair. He only ever lip syncs the line “Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm” and, for four minutes, he seems correct in a way only a law in nature is. The music video is so iconic that Coldplay frontman Chris Martin wanted to replicate it for “Viva la Vida” and donned the same crown and cape in London. But as grandiose as both songs are, “Viva La Vida”’s muted palette ensures that it’s nowhere near as royal as “Enjoy the Silence” was.

"In Germany they are still the little darlings (a little to their chagrin) of kiddie pop TV, in America they are a prosperous cult along the lines of The Cure and New Order. In Britain they are good old Depeche Mode, leather-skirted disco oddballs…” says NME in its February 17, 1990 issue of Depeche Mode. That was before Violator came out, and “Enjoy the Silence” in particular changed the game — to this day, with a distance, their most streamed song. “Are the boys happy?” the piece asks at the end. And they were… at the time, anyway. For such a dark song and bleak mood that Violator conjures, I think you can hear the joy in “Enjoy the Silence”, too.

Rundown

Give me ten songs that I should listen to

This is a variety of slower tracks, louder songs, and their electronic side. And the R&B charmer “Elevator (127F)”, of course. Above all, this is me doing the list, and I think if you’ve made it this far, you must have a good idea of my tastes.

• Cherry Bomb (Cherry Bomb) — in fact, I think this should be your first NCT 127 song if you’ve never heard them before. If you get it then, try your hand with the other titles — if not, there’s the B-side catalogue.

• Limitless (Limitless) — and this is the one other title you should hear. There’s a good number of other NCT 127 title track candidates you could get to — I had “Ay-Yo” on here — but Limitless has the SM songwriting all over it in a way “Cherry Bomb” or even “Ay-Yo” and “Simon Says” don’t, and I think there’s value in seeing how even at their most “standard”, the group clearly operates best with a vague hint of the villainous.

• Love on the Floor (Favorite)

• Sun & Moon (Cherry Bomb)

• Promise You (Sticker/Favorite)

• Time Lapse (2 Baddies/Ay-Yo)

• Switch (NCT #127)

• Save (Save)

• Lipstick (LOVEHOLIC)

• Elevator (127F) (Neo Zone / Neo Zone The Final Round)

One?

Cherry Bomb.

One B-side.

Love on the Floor.

Okay, so there’s a couple reasons for this one. 1) I like big dance tracks. 2) I have been wowed by big dance tracks so many times in my life my default assumption is that so do most people my age (sorry if that’s not you). 3) It’s a fan favorite, and not to indulge in ad populum fallacies, but sometimes the populum happens to be right.

Give me one album/EP I should listen to

Sticker, and I know I go a bit against the grain with that opinion, but it’s the one that feels the fullest. EP — Cherry Bomb, this one is a no-brainer.

What’s the NCT 127 song you listened to most often?

Kick It and it’s not even close. From the B-sides, “Lemonade” followed by “Earthquake”.

I want to start listening to their discography too. Where should I start?

From the start. That’s the only way NCT 127 makes sense, and NCT #127 is an immensely enjoyable EP. The Japanese releases are good too, don’t skip out on them!

As for the solos/subunits/units, Taeyong’s Soundcloud is pretty fun, and his Shalala EP as well as DOJAEJUNG’s Perfume are both among the best K-Pop releases of the year.

Would you recommend their discography?

I actually would, yes! Even if you’re not into K-Pop, there’s so much to NCT 127’s discography that it would make a solid entry point on top of it being a plain fun listen through.

Closing remarks

Doyoung has the best voice in all of K-Pop. In case it wasn’t clear how many times I highlighted him over the album reviews… wow, listening to NCT 127 for over three months really solidified it. Nobody sounds really like him.

I’m also in love with this mashup of Lim Chang Jung’s Love Again and Sticker. It’s immaculate. The best part is also my bio for a while now: 사랑. (훠우! 훠우!)

Its absurdity is up there with the grandiosity of a group that thinks they’re the ones that make the clocks tick, as in: “Clock is ticking, how we do that” — no, it isn’t them quizzing us how NCT 127 is doing that, although it could also be that. I always took it to mean that they’re so big, god-like, that they control time. It compels me. I say we let them. Don’t tell me how you make the clocks tick.

With Monsta X last March, I could play pretend. I could pretend like my first touching point with that group was “Hero” (and it was), that I was there every single time after that (I wasn’t), and that I had positive feelings towards them (I didn’t and I am not ashamed to admit it was likely due to Twitter influencing me). I checked out at some point and returned with “Who Do U Love?”, a song so brilliant it was enough to appropriately feel devastated when Wonho — an idol I very much did not care for for at eighteen, then hilariously did start to appreciate later — left the group during “Follow” promotions, another lead single I thought was brilliant. For me to play pretend with NCT 127, i.e to be serious and not be a fan writing a retrospective worthy of their career, I had to remove myself until it was appropriate (you’ll notice this happen with “Punch” when I bring up the Twitter reactions, which is four years into their career).

Fact of the matter was, I hated “The 7th Sense” when it first came out. I thought it was a terrible song. I thought that certain members sounded like idols I already didn’t care about, now amplified because the song left no room for other events, so sparse is the production. The controversies. I heard the song again recently, for this Potpourri. I don’t hate it anymore, but still thought it undercooked. But Taeyong’s verse, that hook of “we’ll take… it slow…” of Doyoung and Taeyong, has stuck with me for seven long years.

Then there was the fact that NCT was an insanity project — like a passion project, only, well, objectively insane on Lee Soo-man’s part — that NCT 127 seemingly never fled from: though I changed my mind on NCT 127 a year after “The Seventh Sense”, with “Cherry Bomb”, The NCT Album came out in 2018, and I realized caring about NCT 127 meant caring about all these other units. It frightened and annoyed me in equal measure. It was like the Middle Eastern idea of marriage — you don’t marry one person, it’s two families marrying — in a musical version, and I bristled against it. So for a long time, I didn’t care what NCT 127 was up to… until I had to, in 2020, when seemingly my entire timeline enjoyed Neo Zone. I didn’t care for the album; it wasn’t my way of keeping up with K-Pop then. But I returned to “Kick It” despite my first lukewarm impression, over and over… and then I found I kept up with their new titles, and didn’t I know the names of the members, and wasn’t Jaehyun — a member I never understood the hype for — actually… quite attractive, and his timbre interesting?

What you feel about a musical act isn’t “just” your musical preference, and never is. It’s about what the people around you think, the state of mind you are in at a time. It’s the fickle nature of opinion that makes music criticism, like all forms of art criticism, both difficult and worthwhile. Two years ago, I’d have scoffed at myself for writing over 15k words on this group. Now, I think of the friends I made, and the trove of music I enjoyed, thanks to NCT 127. And, it pleases me to say, NCT group releases are no longer seen with the same relevance as they did five years ago. I feel vindicated!

When I say that NCT 127 endbosses, I really do mean it — not just in my own listening journey, but in K-Pop writ large. Over the course of seven years, every boygroup did a NCT 127 song. Don’t believe me? From SM: “Obsession”, “Don’t Call Me”, “Step Back” all rely on DemJointz, who had never been utilized as a master of noisy hip hop music before “Cherry Bomb”. Outside of SM: “God’s Menu”. “Maverick”. “Bouncy (K-Hot Chili Peppers)” — all these sounds, NCT 127 flaunted with in their title tracks one way or another. They were ahead of the curve, and, at this point, doing avant-garde music is no longer necessary to still be the guiding light for a great many boygroups. I think that’s an interesting spot to be at career-wise, and as they branch out and add to the idea of what NCT 127 could sound like (Taeyong: the leads; DOJAEJUNG: the B-sides), the group will surely take the graceful leap to the pantheon in K-Pop discographies. Though quite honestly, even if they were to disband today, they’d be there already. Even if their entire discography just boiled down on “Sticker” — indeed their best song — they’d be at the very top.

Where is K-Pop going to be headed from here on out? Will there be a change up, and if so, what — not when — will cause the changing of the guards? Perhaps such questions are futile with a genre as insular and copy-happy as K-Pop is. Perhaps there will never be a changing of the guards, or not in the way that was clearly the case a decade ago. Perhaps the changing of the guards has happened: people look at the new Mnet boygroup ZeroBaseOne and don’t consider what NCT 127 members they should be or what songs of theirs sing (though many of them did cover “Kick It” for the show Boys Planet 999); NCT DoJaeJung, a subunit of Doyoung, Jaehyun, and Jungwoo, shows a path towards the collective desire to relive the Y2K we all imagine must’ve happened from its glossiest pages. But seven years is an impressively long time, and NCT 127 pushed to the very ends of what’s accepted as K-Pop music. In doing so, they’ve carved out a space in which a song can be perceived as anything from the greatest music ever made to absolute turd, two extremes that many K-Pop songs outright avoid lest it rise above the lowest common denominator (and maximum profit). They’ve carved a space in which hip-hop and electronic music doesn’t have to stand at odds with each other in K-Pop, music in which more is more. It’ll take years before this sound trickles down to acceptable, safe levels. Eventually, DemJointz will be written in K-Pop annals like producers before him; Yoo Youngjin, who already sits on those annals, has already become a villain for not “featuring vocalists enough” in some corners of Twitter. The changing of the guard is underway, and it’ll be a slow, arduous process to witness. Until then, NCT 127 will stand ahead, the trailblazers that left nothing behind (not even ashes), the bar to clear. The future will become present when NCT 127 sounds dated. For now, that world seems as distant as a nightmare.

As is usual of a whole host of SM groups, all members of NCT 127 are booked and busy — Mark and Haechan in NCT Dream aside, the other members’ work ranges from DJ-ing (Johnny) to acting (Yuta) to runway moments and brand ambassadorship (Johnny, Jaehyun, Taeyong, Yuta, most recently Doyoung for Dolce & Gabbana). Still, between NCT U songs and sub-units and solos — even Soundcloud releases —, there is a handful of NCT 127 solo work. And also, a whole host of… unreleased songs that were performed? This is not normal with K-Pop, but of course NCT 127 works outside of all that.

SOLOS

Taeil

To see Taeil, the oldest and one of the main vocals of NCT 127, record the music that eventually makes it the light of day immediately completes a sonic impression hard to put into words otherwise. He puts every fibre of his body when he sings of the italicized kind. His eyes are closed and sometimes his hand is pressed to his chest to really reach those notes. It gives the vocals an almost bound feeling, as if they strain to be free. But far from this sounding unpleasant, it leads Taeil to be one of the most textured vocalists of the group. Some of his solo work, mostly original soundtrack contributions, go with the strained feeling — others show him far freer with his vocals, as on the cover of Kim Min-Gi’s “A Beautiful Vocal”, to which he lends a gentle touch. But even more brilliant is his feature with Moon Sujin, the soul-indebted “The Moon”, which has him adopt an almost rap-like cadence on the verses and go airy near the end. His harmonization with Sujin, a classic soprano, is a cherry on top. (That, and the fact their last names are both Moon performing a song named The Moon.) For his birthday, Taeil has opened a channel and released a cover of Day6’s exuberant “Time Of Our Life”, and if being airborne involved the physical feeling of flapping wings, Taeil sings with each feather feeling the wind.

Taeyong

The most prolific NCT 127 member with solo releases, Taeyong has steadily built up a number of Soundcloud releases over the years that start out with cloud trap and become increasingly more complex. Culminating in the EP SHALALA — all B-sides of which penned, co-produced and co-composed by him — Taeyong as an artist is a contemplative, melancholy one. Of these tracks, “Virtual Insanity” has lived two lives as “GTA” and “GTA 2” on Soundcloud before, if in inferior versions. Based around bouncy, angular drums, Taeyong is free to explore an aggressive, cybernetic world that is not too far from the NCT 127 soundscape. To hear him get closer to it until the final version, one that is polished to such a degree that the neon lights practically burst at its seams, must feel nothing short of profound happiness to both Taeyong and his long-term fans.

My favorite of the Soundcloud tracks are “Rose”, featuring an incredible verse by labelmate Seulgi of Red Velvet , an alt-pop track with cloud rap sensibilities and Taeyong singrapping to quite charming success, and “Monroe”, featuring SuperM groupmate Baekhyun. The latter is more firmly in tropical pop foundations, and has Baekyhun rap-sing in ways he never goes to in EXO (or SuperM). What “Monroe” also does tremendously well is remain upbeat in ways none of Taeyong’s other Soundcloud songs are, a song so fully fleshed it’s hard to imagine it’s just out for free on a Soundcloud. Taeyong strikes a natural chemistry with anyone he sings (or dances) with, and here, they fold to his vision of the sonic equivalent of a lava lamp, hypnotizing and enticing at once. But as it is with most things he features on, the centerpiece remains himself, the most hypnotizing part of all.

Yuta

With his long hair, piercing eyes, and an aggressive performance style — including the company he keeps — everything about Yuta screams rock star. It’s unsurprising, then, that the one clip that is passed around with Yuta is a cover of L’Arc en Ciel’s “Honey” that he sings with passion and fervor. Typically this is followed with the declaration by fans that he needs to sing more on NCT 127 songs, but he already sings quite a bit… on B-sides, as the other baritone. More nasal in tone and more distant in attitude than Jaehyun, Yuta’s great strength is when this voice of his that is seemingly cold by nature runs through fire. His unreleased solo track “Butterfly”, first performed at a concert, is a serviceable dance track that only utilizes this Yuta of the surface, but Yuta knows better. Uploaded through Instagram Reels, “Crime & Punishment” was originally performed by Sheena Ringo in 2000, a trip hop-esque percussion with a rockstar-burlesque sweep on the vocal end, a big and theatrical song in every aspect. Yuta rips into the song with fervor. Suddenly, that cold voice gains a brittle, emotional edge to it, and he’s absolutely comfortable screaming on many points on. One can only imagine how his solo music would sound like if it continued in this vein.

Doyoung

The first thing to note about Doyoung is that his vocals seem to pierce through everything — it’s clear and bright and technically completely in control. But unlike Taeil, whose vocals are often slinky, Doyoung sings like he’s searching for someone, a yearning quality that is especially well-suited on romantic fare. On many points in NCT 127’s discography, he gets brilliant moments that he, in turn, polishes to perfection just by singing on it; an effect amplified when the amount of members is reduced and the sonic palette becomes firmly set in soul and R&B, which is exactly where NCT DOJAEJUNG (of which he is the Do) is settled. On his solo works, almost all of which K-drama OSTs, that yearning quality of his voice is amplified — and matched often enough with a piano, their clear notes a good match with his own. “Like a Star,” a contribution for Yumi’s Cells, is a torch song with electric guitar and acoustic guitar in tandem creating a bit of texture for Doyoung’s voice, on which he sounds like he’s simultaneously consoled, enchanted, and even a little melancholy about it all, easily the best OST song he sung for.

It also bears mentioning that Doyoung likes to cover all sorts of songs that span from pop to R&B tracks to outright ballads, all of which beautifully reinterpreted. The best of these he’s done in an episode of the Lee Mujin Service, Hynn’s “시든 꽃에 물을 주듯” (The Lonely Bloom Stands Alone) with a performance so incredible and emotive it moves to tears.

Jaehyun

Jaehyun boasts one of the fewest solo works of the NCT 127 members, but both “Try Again” and “Forever Only” are songs that reveal Jaehyun’s penchant for melancholy music and guitars. One of the few baritones of the group, Jaehyun can both be gentle and chilly, rap and sing at the same time. “Forever Only” has him adopt a rap-like cadence on a surprisingly fast-paced coffee shop song at points and even a key change on the final chorus. But the best song under his belt is one not released yet: “Lost”, a R&B lament on a former lover on which Jaehyun sings with real hurt and confusion in his voice. On an interview with Esquire that came out earlier this year, Jaehyun mentioned that he had concerns about various singing techniques a very long time ago, but now really likes his own technique1. I like to think that you can hear it across the discography, that growing confidence. Jaehyun grounds every song he tackles, and all of them crackle with electricity one way or another.

Jungwoo

To make a line like “bless me, achoo” work in “Simon Says” requires a certain kind of cool, and Jungwoo, who joined the group in 2018, has it in spades. The image I have of him most often when he performs is that half-smile of his — as if he knows you know he’s cool, and just can’t help being cool, ever. When he isn’t just assisting with attitude and delivering fresh and lemony vocal takes within the group, and really sings, he bears resemblance to Doyoung, if maybe more closed off. The cover he chose for some kind of NCT 127 variety, Ne-Yo’s “So Sick”, is a good example of this. Jungwoo is an unshowy vocalist, but technically rests on firm foundations, which works perfectly well with pop songs: “Smiling Angel”, a cover he did for Music Bank — which he hosts alongside NMIXX’s Sullyoon and Stray Kids’s Lee Know — fully flexes his superstar powers and his sensibilities as a pop singer. And always, there is that half-smile of his.

Mark

Mark is pure charisma — of which one needs a truckload amount of to make a line like “and that’s a longass ride” so memorable. It’s no wonder that besides his two purely solo works — “Child” and “Golden Hour” — he’s been featured in quite the number of in-house SM releases. Of these, I was struck by how EXO’s Xiumin and Mark have a vocal synergy that is not quite there in other NCT 127 releases: two nasal tenors that seemingly inhabit about the same spaces and attitudes in a song. “How We Do”, from Xiumin’s debut mini album Brand New, has both Xiumin and Mark sing and rap to a spirited track that is interested in packing just about anything inside there: bouncy beats, New Jack Swing, disco, guitars, autotune, you name it, this track has it. The charisma of both Xiumin and Mark holds the song together quite well, though. It’s always a treat to hear Mark sing, because his limited capabilities almost always makes him sound timid as a singer — quite the contrast to his often boisterious and big raps. Xiumin is happy to work the track with him, rather than just relegate him to one verse. The energy is infectious. For a song just performed by him, there’s a number of songs he performed on SuperM tours, and also the throwaway “QTAH” (Quality Time At Home) that Johnny filmed, on which Mark raps with an easy flow and a certain thoughtfulness to his cadence. The charisma, of course, remains.

Haechan

Haechan has a tenor that makes him sound like his voice has never dropped — bright and often pretty, my favorite contributions of his are typically adlibs and incredible runs nested in another incredible run. Unlike Jungwoo, Haechan has one OST under his belt. “Good Person (2022)” is an acoustic guitar ballad on which Haechan sounds lovely but can’t exactly elevate the usual K-Drama track, which is fine. Somehow, though, listening to it reminded me of his great idol, Michael Jackson, who sounded similar when he was very, very young. Unlike Jackson, though, who progressively sang with anger and paranoia in his voice, Haechan sings here with gentler emotions: something like hurt, as if the thought of loving someone was too much to bear. It’s not a type of voice I associate with him. His part in “Elevator (127F)”, though, that “Let’s! Just! Keep! This! Simple,” is more like it: a boyish charm that is absolutely essential to all NCT 127 songs.

UNIT SONGS

This presupposes that all members I will talk about here are NCT 127 members.

“Maniac” (Doyoung, Haechan)

Ryan Jhun, who started out his songwriting and producing career by working with SM Entertainment acts, gets an assist by Doyoung and Haechan with a funky, summery track that recalls Calvin Harris’s Funky Wav Bounces Vol. 1 — when Doyoung and Haechan sing about how she is a maniac, it sounds like neither are too bothered by it. In fact, they love her just like that. The guitar lends it all a warm, briny feeling of the ocean at sunset, recalling more Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” than the Michael Sembello song also called “Maniac”. Haechan is especially well-suited to the track, his voice high and energy spirited throughout. But Doyoung, this close to adopting a diva attitude to the track, frequently goes breathless in the chorus and turns “Maniac” a winner.

“New Love” (Doyoung, Jaehyun)

For the show When You’re On The Blacklist Of Bullies, we hear Jaehyun’s warm baritone on a rare drama soundtrack contribution — and Doyoung’s not soon after. It’s a tropical pop track on which both sing together, and the baritone/tenor make a good duo that one can’t help but see as a precursor to the excellence that is NCT DOJAEJUNG. This is also one of the most spirited NCT U OST tracks and one of the few that actually stands on its own.

“conNEXTion (Age of Light)” (Doyoung, Mark, Haechan)

This crunchy, metallic SM Station track reduces the NCT fare to just three components, all of which have featured on the very first NCT track: Mark’s confident rapping, Haechan’s light vocals, Doyoung’s soaring singing. “Connect, connect me — connect, connect you” Mark intones in the chorus. It’s a story you’ve heard a couple times before, and its idea of accelerating only to cruelly pull back and then drive fully forward has been played out in the past, too. If anything else, it works as a reminder of how the group, this project started out — back when they were not so much singers but part of a grand scheme to change the world.

“Kiss” (NCT DOJAEJUNG)

The first subunit off NCT 127, DoJaeJung delves deeper into the R&B back catalogue that NCT 127 has become known for with fans. But that’s not to imply that Doyoung, Jaehyun and Jungwoo are simply replicating what NCT 127 did — a track like “Kiss” feels lighter than the usual NCT 127 R&B tracks, and also more outwardly sexual. As the cymbals and vocal samples swirl around, the vocalists play coy until the chorus, exuberant, spells the desired objective out. U-R-L-I-P-S ur lips, kiss: each vocalist gets his own chance to add a flourish to the last line of the chorus and post-chorus, when things are reduced to just the cymbals and the vocalist. “Kiss” is sexy and grown, and each chorus feels as heart-fluttering as the first.

The unreleased vault

K-Pop does not usually work with leaks, and the few that are worth mentioning are big ones (e.g EXO’s “Wolf”). Songs that are released at a concert usually make it to the listener in studio version one way or another. In fact, NCT DOJAEJUNG has started out as a marketing research scheme— I mean unit stage on a NCT 127 concert before the interest was big enough to translate “Can We Go Back” as the very last song of their debut EP, Perfume. But for some of these tracks, it seems they just exist as performance songs, or — in particularly egregious cases — are turned to NCT U songs.

"Love Sign” (Taeil, Haechan)

This song is regularly passed around on Twitter when the topic turns to a prospective Taeil solo track. Like Yuta’s “Butterfly” and Jaehyun’s “Lost”, this track debuted at a concert first and features Haechan and Taeil on a propulsive R&B track; the song doesn’t bring out their strengths beyond a big vocal moment for Taeil and Haechan, who sound better on dramatic and funky material respectively. What this does excite in me, though, is the possibility of combinations — Taeil and Haechan approach a song differently, thus creating a synergy that is intriguing both on paper and in execution. It also reminds me of a moment where Taeil’s pinched and Haechan’s high vocals work flawlessly: the dancey, funky bridge in “Superhuman”.

“Switch Off” (Doyoung, Taeyong)

Taeyong, as it has been noted, is a prolific songwriter, but what I haven’t touched on here yet is that he has songs from before he debuted that Doyoung would hear first. On two of the tracks previewed, Doyoung features prominently as vocal, and the chemistry between the two — they are close friends off-stage — immediately translates to the songs as well. Perhaps the best feature on all of Taeyong’s tracks is Doyoung, who understands the melancholy wave that Taeyong’s solo works all operate on. Both these tracks, “Yestoday” and “Switch Off”, can be categorized as old-school hip hop tracks. “Yestoday” features dusty pianos on which Doyoung has the lovely duty of chorus singing, while Taeyong raps about the positive influence that Doyoung has had in his life (”Somehow you’d always try to drag those bad days away from me”) and the dark days that hung over Taeyong like a cloud. This track eventually made it the light of the studio recording — as a NCT U song, however, featuring two more members. On the NCT U song, Mark also raps about how he’s now in a new loop that seems not too different from the times he’d ride the bus to his school — and then comes ex-NCT member Lucas adding negative value to the track, talking about a relationship for reasons unknown (in English) before Doyoung thankfully saves the track with one last chorus, filling the space with very inspired “ay, ay, ay” adlibs.

“Switch Off” is another melancholy track that similarly features dusty pianos and a notably sadder melody than “Yestoday” — Doyoung once again carries the track with a pristine feeling of sadness, while Taeyong pours his heart into the rap verse, simultaneously the most aggressive and forlorn he’s ever sounded. The NCT U track, now called “Light Bulb”, adds Sungchan and Kun to the mix (and a whole lot of welcomed production budget), but the originally emotional track becomes something of a maudlin affair that seemingly only exists because all of SM Entertainment releases feature rap ballads of this kind. Maybe that’s a hyperbole to think of a track as worse only because other vocalists are on it with no noticeable positive or negative effects — but the dilution of Doyoung and Taeyong, two immediate performers, warrants such descriptors. They are good friends; they are great artists in their own right; hopefully at some point they get to be on a track together without other people around.

“Colors” (group)

A Japanese-only track that debuted in the Japan leg of the concert tour “NEO CITY: The Link” that still hasn’t seen a release, this one is a charming tropical pop-tinged R&B track that would make a very good B-side to an upcoming release — and, as a more recent development that all their later releases boast, all the vocalists sound suited to the track, the track flowing with an effortless ease. There are rumors that the upcoming NCT 127 is, again, in the third quarter of the year, just like “2 Baddies” has been. But if this will be a Japanese release remains to be seen. The fact that I am sitting here telling you about a B-side that has yet to be released for reasons not even SM Entertainment could conjure to any of us says more about me than it will about NCT 127 — but it does say something about their vibrant catalogue, past, present, and the ones just waiting to be released.

As a fan of a SM Entertainment artist, one can rely on the album as a piece worth the money and energy and time, and NCT 127 is no different in that regard. Straddling a variety of genres and boasting an incredible lineup of vocalists, each of them distinct, the group’s discography overall may not be as influential as their vastly successful singles run, but no less charming and magnetizing. Theirs is a discography that boasts little flaws, showcasing a group that pivoted from an electronic-heavy sound to one comfortable with R&B and adult contemporary, too. When they received the coveted Grand Prize (the Korean equivalent of the Album of the Year Grammy) in 2021, it felt simultaneously just at the right time and too late. For the sake of brevity and with the inevitability of my fallible taste, the selection of songs below will surely not appease the hardcore fans. Nevertheless, my aim is to showcase the limitlessness of NCT 127’s capability, the B-sides that prove that NCT isn’t all noise, and honor the tracks that have not left my heavy rotation.

Bolded tracks are highlights.

NCT #127

The first EP

Released: July 10th, 2016

Lead single: “Fire Truck” / B-side performed: “여름 방학 (Once Again)”

The initial EP of NCT 127 doesn’t yet feature Doyoung and has no qualms to sideline big vocal moments for the performance, that is to say, the club. Most of NCT #127 seems like a glimpse into a SM Entertainment that sought out EDM in its main label rather than through its imprint ScreaM records (this was, it must be said, before Hyoyeon adopted the moniker HYO and made it her sonic calling card). This SM hinted at its interest in electronic music from 2014’s Red Light record by f(x) and continued it in 2015’s 4 Walls and SHINee’s View. NCT #127 neatly follows the trend by featuring a variety of synth pads: ones that sound metallic, ones that are distant and floaty only to pull deeper, icy percussion elsewhere with autotuned and heavily processed vocals. This is NCT 127 in its rawest form, and everything that followed would expand on these humble beginnings. From it, “Wake Up” (the sung ”let’s just wake up this world” leading to a drop that sounds like waking up a Blade Runner-esque world) and “Another World” (highlight: the chanted pre-chorus “I don’t wanna feel nothing”) stand as two particularly inspired examples of this EDM vision.

And then there’s “Switch”, and this is the one that features Doyoung (here as a not-yet debuted trainee of the SRB15 roster). Doyoung had a wide-eyed look to him in early music videos (”Without U”, “Limitless”), something bright and chipper, and as he opens “Switch”, that visual fully translates to his voice as he asks where is this place? I’m curious. Described as UK garage, the pads give it a jungle-esque feel without fully delving into the 90s genre, and the chanted chorus is an exercise in tightness of excessively bright male vocals that cede to those glorious synths and a wordless vocalization in a satisfying payoff. There’s a mystique to “Switch” in that moment, one that sells the NCT concept better than all of the desert videos ever could, and the main perpetrator of this is Doyoung, who sticks out in every single chorus and every single verse he does. The music clicks when he sings over it. “Switch” is a song rendered so beautiful in his voice that it’s difficult, almost tantalizing, to imagine that there would be much better, stronger Doyoung moments to come. It’s ironically inversely proportional to the idea that NCT 127 would have much stronger moments in their discography than a jungle track.

LIMITLESS

The second EP

Released: January 6th, 2017

Lead single: “Limitless” / B-side performed: “Good Thing”

With Limitless, Johnny and Doyoung officially became members of NCT 127. For the latter, that meant more moments where he could stretch his vocals. As such, the EP packs a variety of genres in the songs that is standard for quite a few of K-Pop releases out today, especially of SM Entertainment. The most standard of which, of course, is the acoustic guitar ballad “Angel” (which is also the closer) and the obligatory B-side they performed at the time, the bizarre saxophone / synth-led “Good Thing”. The middle, however, is where the EP houses some of the most beloved B-sides of the NCT 127 catalogue to this day. Starting with “Back 2 U (01:27 AM)”, a R&B track with murky synths throughout, the song suddenly springs to life when Doyoung sings his legendary “Ireojima” (Don’t do it) in the bridge. “Heartbreaker” (Korean: “Rollercoaster”) is even better, the punchy percussion, dizzying synths, and vocal sample of the intro swirling around the mix forming the basis for another melancholy track that still sounds chipper. Finishing this trifecta of love and heartbreak is “Baby Don’t Like It”, mostly performed by Mark and Taeyong, in which snaps, drills, bouncy percussion, whistles, and the easily-recognizable Jersey club “bed squeaks” make a good foundation for the two. The highlight, though, once again belongs to Doyoung, who has a star turn in both the chorus and the bridge. The group doesn’t yet sound like NCT 127 on this EP, but for a showcase of Doyoung vocals, Limitless gets the job done splendidly.

Cherry Bomb

The third EP

Released: June 14th, 2017

Lead single: “Cherry Bomb” / B-side performed: “0 Mile“

To this day, Cherry Bomb stands as one of the best releases of NCT 127’s catalogue, and it’s not because “Cherry Bomb” begins and finishes the EP. Its canny combination of cool synths and classic SM songwriting make the group’s third EP an auditory journey to the futuristic. Far from the antagonistic “Cherry Bomb,” the other songs strike a more romantic and even summery tone throughout, whether that’s the fizzy “0 Mile”, the rap-heavy “Whiplash” (chorus member this time: Jaehyun) or the deep house-reliant “Summer 127”. One of the songs nudging the EP to a soundscapes hitherto unexplored in K-Pop is the ethereal synth ballad “Sun & Moon” led by Taeil, Jaehyun, and Doyoung, taking inspiration from Majid Jordan’s synth-heavy ballad style with a dark, propulsive beat throughout, never going higher than it should be. It is not the most evocative NCT 127 would be, but one of their moodiest moments. The other one is “Running 2 U”. It starts things with a paranoid set of bleeps, as well as punchy kicks and claps, before ultimately revealing a instrumental chorus of a top line that snakes through the murky soundscape. As the song concludes with repetitions of “Running! To You!” the vocals warp and bend all over again in one single declaration. “Running to you!” It has a first draft quality to it, its ending unresolved, almost unsatisfied with itself. It marks one of the most addictive turns of their discography just yet.

Chain

The first Japanese EP

Released: May 16th, 2018

Lead single: “Chain”

The first Japanese EP of NCT 127 explores the group’s R&B side before their Korean discography did. “Limitless” was originally Korean and one of the singles for this release, while the serviceable B-side “Come Back” would be performed in Korean not much later. That leaves things with the closer “100”, which starts out mellow but later turns aggressive and acidic. The vocal sample at the back here feels more reductive and less interesting to the song as the members trudge on in the chorus with nary a worry. Taeyong’s brief rap verse is the sole point of interest for “100”, but things are different for opener “Dreaming”, which makes a winning combination with its clapping, bubbling percussion of a slow tango tempo and its bass loop. The chorus is by Taeyong and Mark, which almost borders on spoken-word as they finish the chorus with “dreaming, dream-ing dream-ing” over and over, the NCT manifesto in one word.

Regular-Irregular / Regulate

The first full-length album (and repackage) first release with Jungwoo as NCT 127 member

Released: October 12th, 2018 (Regular-Irregular) / November 23rd, 2018 (Regulate)

Lead single: “Regular” (Regular-Irregular) / “Simon Says” (Regulate)

B-sides performed: “Come Back” (Regular-Irregular) / “Chain (Korean version)” (Regulate)

To Regular-Irregular (and its deluxe version Regulate), the difference of regular life and irregular dreaming didn’t just begin and end with the rollout and the title track in NCT 127’s first full length album. Much like “Regular,” Regular-Irregular also works as an ode to the metropolis, where both regular and irregular things could happen — often simultaneously. The deluxe track “Welcome to my Playground” makes its idea quite clear, though its bit pop melody feels at odds with the rest of the album. “City 127”, as the ode to Seoul, sets the scene as opener far better, a romantic scene in the ever-shining city, with whistles and bright piano notes. Meanwhile, the LDN Noise-produced highlight “Replay (01:27 PM)” makes a keen auditory observation on a city’s bustling work day with deep house, airy synth pads, and a chanted “I just want to be / I just want to be loved”. The Taeyong and Mark-fronted “My Van” sounds even more desolate, with its constant ringing and industrial drums detailing the busy life of busy SM idols such as NCT, while Yuta and Jaehyun extend the vowels on how they ride on their van. They issue a simple command: “Keep driving.”

This being a NCT release, dreams are never too far away, and Johnny makes it literal by bookending the interlude: “All we see or seem… is but a dream within a dream.” Through most of Regular-Irregular is accordingly floaty in its sonic ideas — a notable exception being the piano ballad “No Longer” — “Fly Away With Me” stands out as a particularly ethereal one. Taeil and Doyoung sound immaculate on the opener, as if both are airborne, particularly the latter, who sings as if a voice could levitate a person. The synths do nothing to tether either of them down, not even when the chorus doubles their voice. Jaehyun closes the song at the climax with a sweeping fervor, the cherry on top to such a brilliant track. NCT 127 sound at their best when their slower moments are wrapped in such digitized clouds. Though not fully fleshed out in its ideas just yet, Regular-Irregular marks a good step in the right direction.

Awaken

First Japanese full-length album

Released: April 17th, 2019

Title: “Wakey-Wakey”

The first full length Japanese album of NCT marks a serviceable collection of tracks and already released Korean (or, in “Regular”’s case, English) titles, though the sequencing itself isn’t quite there yet as it was in Korean releases already. Of the new tracks, “Lips” plays out like a strange ambient piece of whistling straight out of the 2002 soundtrack of the Gamecube game Metroid Prime, a moody piece of romance. Meanwhile, “Blow My Mind” utilizes bleeps and snaps to a foggy dance chorus that almost recalls the 00s K-Pop releases, particularly of SM’s own catalogue. “Long Slow Distance” is another piano ballad, while “Kitchen Beat” is the noisiest NCT 127 would get just yet, full of clanking beats and numerous tempo changes at the start (and Jaehyun and Yuta both switching to rapping) on the basis of cooking a five-star meal in the kitchen. The chorus here is more a chanted afterthought than it is a sung moment, and oddly enough, a song like this — a B-side on a Japanese release — would predict what K-Pop of the boygroup variety would evolve to in the years to come.

After briefly pivoting to “Cherry Bomb” and “Fire Truck” in their original Korean versions, Awaken ends with its strongest point yet: “End to Start”, a midtempo track utilizing chilly synths and a rare moment of Mark singing. The chorus, here, slows down with a low bass ruminating, and has them all sing at the same time. It’s almost as though somebody here was inspired by Daft Punk’s collaboration with Julien Casablancas, the chilly cinematic glam-rock piece “Instant Crush”. It’s a very melancholy moment to end an album on, one NCT 127 would never go back to, making it all the more remarkable.

WE ARE SUPERHUMAN

The fourth EP

Released: May 24th, 2019

Lead single: “Superhuman”

In a portal peeking into a parallel timeline opened by SM sometime 2018, NCT 127 is a normal K-Pop group doing normal boygroup music. WE ARE SUPERHUMAN is one of those normal K-Pop boygroup releases that managed to make it into this timeline. The EP is full of well-sung, well-produced, and faceless pop music. The most original thought the release has is to finish the EP with an outro named “We are 127” with a runtime of 1:27 and some club noises that recalls their early ventures. Nevertheless, NCT 127 are adept at straightforward pop music and K-Pop bsides too. “FOOL” makes the best one of these, with a busy synth line and a busier rap from Mark before the warm vocals describe an awkward romantic moment — it would prove quite prescient for what was about to come. Meanwhile, “Paper Plane” was the second attempt at “01:27 PM (Replay)” as a happy-go-lucky variant, and “Jet Lag” is at odds between outright ballad and coffeeshop midtempo track and works just enough so as to not distract, mainly because Doyoung’s voice shines the brightest with tracks like these, where he can stretch his vocal chops a little and emote throughout. “Got each other, other” as a chant at the end sounds awkward and the song never quite fulfills its promise as the 90s throwback it could be. We are 127, though.

Neo Zone / The Final Round

The second full-length album (and repackage)

Released: March 6th, 2020 (Neo Zone) / May 5th, 2020 (Final Round)

Lead single: “Kick It” (Neo Zone) / “Punch” (Final Round)

B-sides performed: “Prelude”, “White Night” (Neo Zone) / “The Final Round” (Punch)

The rollout of the second album Neo Zone started on 127 day, January 27, with an obvious throwback to the 90s: “Dreams Come True”, an R&B track that utilizes floaty synths and angelic singing. The music video to “Dreams Come True”, similarly, goes heavy on the pastiche: credits flashing at the start, closeups of all members smiling, everyone arm in arm in a bleach-white room. Unlike “Kick It”, it was this pre-released track that would set the tone for a great majority of Neo Zone: a place in which the nostalgic ceded to bliss, often of the romantic kind. The corresponding track videos to Neo Zone go there literally: the charming opener “Elevator (127F)” has the boys wait and jam inside the elevator, “Pandora’s Box” imagines a fun, early-morning present opening session with the viewer. Though “Boom”’s Korean title is dream, it leads NCT 127 to enact a film with a ladder and a shopping cart as props, and “Day Dream” goes for the dreamy imagery of clouds inside a room. Other titles have love in their title: “Love Me Now” (the setting of the track video: a harbor and lots of smoke bombs) and “Love Song” (a yellow studio and moist leaves) appear on Neo Zone back to back. Like with Regular-Irregular, the rap-heavy tracks come after the interlude: the group-led “Sit Down” (the video: Taeyong and Mark in a garage) and the Mark/Taeyong-led “Mad Dog”, in which Mark and Taeyong are sitting in a parked car with huskies and glitch out. There’s also piano ballads here, “White Night”, a black-white shot music video, and the fan track “Not Alone”, on which a desktop is simulated with the members making heart eyes at the viewer.

NeoZone’s sole problem is probably putting “Kick It” so early into the album, thus cushioning it between much more benign songs: “Elevator (127F)” and “Boom”. The repackage Final Round opens a salvo of much more aggressive tracks — “Punch” leads to the synth-assault “NonStop” and then to the instrumental “Prelude” before arriving at “Kick It” (”Elevator (127F)” at the very end feels perfect). What befuddles me here is that the interlude ends with “no more trauma”, a line from “Kick It” — and instead it’s lead to “MAD DOG”. Nevertheless, this is nitpicking of the highest order, as NCT 127’s tip of the hat for a bygone era still makes for incredibly charming moments. The vocalists get to shine in glossy, but generally unobstructive production — and the moments in which the production does go big and abrasive, you get moments like “MAD DOG”, on which a violin is distorted and bent out of shape a couple times in the chorus, complete with a horror-esque piano chord. Produced by Hitchhiker, the moment that truly ties the song together is Doyoung and Yuta’s bridge, the couplet of “Welcome to my party / Welcome to my nightmare” both arriving with distortion.

There’s a wider section of songs with big vocal moments — a feast, even — with “Day Dream” standing out as one particularly airy example. The chorus, with its staccato delivery and the stacked vocals, gives off the feeling of a track by labelmates Red Velvet, who typically favor vocal harmonies in their discography. Elsewhere, “Elevator (127F)” and “Love Song” make a good pair of R&B tracks, the former with a wordless, euphoric chorus, strings and electric guitars in the mix, the latter from the Pharrell / Neptunes playbook by its four-count introduction and its glossy and crunchy beat. “Love Me Now” is another continuation of “Replay (01:27PM)”, and “White Night” delves in deep into the adult contemporary section, with all the vocalists on it more than up to the task, delivering a beautiful performance over bright and purring synths. The Final Round adds another piano ballad, “Make Your Day” to the mix, as well as pulsating highlight “NonStop”, borrowing from EXO with its big group vocals and an “ah-yeah!” between chorus and verse. Overall, NeoZone is a charming release and a well-deserved fan favorite, if more vibey than the last album.

Resonance (NCT)

The second full-length album by the overall group NCT

Release: October 12th, 2020 (Part 1); November 23rd, 2020 (Part 2)

Lead single: “Make A Wish (Birthday Song)” (Part 1) / “90’s Love” (Part 2)

In every NCT release, there is one song that is performed by each unit. “Music, Dance”, NCT 127’s track for 2020’s Resonance, takes the title literally — utilizing a deep percussion and starting out with a high energy only to slow down during the pre-chorus and to return the velocity in a chanted chorus. Of note here is Jaehyun, clearly comfortable quasi-talking on a track with an icy confidence, and Jungwoo’s lemony, unshowy voice who makes a great fit with cold production like this. The production shows its cards quite soon, though, and the rest of the vocal melody doesn’t accommodate to it consistently. NCT #127 has more interesting ideas than this track does.

LOVEHOLIC

The second Japanese EP

Release: February 17th, 2021

Lead single: “gimme gimme”

At just five original tracks, and thus one of NCT 127’s shortest releases, each track on LOVEHOLIC is polished to perfection. “Lipstick” starts with metallic synths and deep percussion and only briefly pauses its ferocity during its pre-chorus. “First Love”, right after, gives Ariana Grande and Social House’s “Boyfriend” a well-deserved bouncy update and makes full usage of many vocalists on that angelic pre-chorus, cushioning the feeling of love in the chorus with Doyoung and Taeil at the lead, while behind him you can hear Jaehyun and Haechan. The clubby, loud “Chica Bom Bom” uses a militaristic trap snare and synth pads to reveal more drums on a shouted title in the chorus. Its biggest strength is its energy, which holds all elements of the disparate production together and makes for one of the most jumpable moments in NCT 127’s discography. Rounding out LOVEHOLIC is “Right Now,” seemingly beginning as ballad, before the synths kick in like a fall down from a building. Of course, the moody feeling continues, but the song is backed with dancey production even at its most moody moments. Taeyong slides over the percussive-heavy verse with absolute ease with his rap. But then there’s the drop that the song brings back for the bridge, which turns out to be one of the sickest earworms NCT 127 have in their arsenal, and that it doesn’t sound like it could come from this moody offering makes it all the more sticky. LOVEHOLIC doesn’t have the time to build up narratives — musical or otherwise — but much like its lead single “gimme gimme”, its off-kilter charm captures a snapshot of NCT 127 at their best.

Sticker / Favorite

The third full-length album (and repackage)

Release: September 17th, 2021 (Sticker); October 25th, 2021 (Favorite)

Lead single: “Sticker” (Sticker) / “Favorite” (Favorite)

B-sides performed: “Lemonade”, “Promise You” (Sticker)

The album that finally got NCT 127 the coveted Grand Prize is uninterested in concepts or even so much as an interlude. As soon as “Sticker” is done, the promoted B-side “Lemonade” continues in ferocity and ominous vibes. While the post-chorus, a necessarily calm after the storm that is the chorus, is reminiscent of Las Ketchup’s only hit “Aseraje”, the quick rap verses — and again, that icy chill of Jaehyun’s baritone — make this one as much of a rollercoaster as “Sticker” has been just a song prior. With their strongest club offering, “Breakfast” keeps the pace — only to suddenly come to a screeching halt with the R&B highlight “Focus” (Doyoung in the first second is so breathy that he practically melts into the gossamer synths) and go even slower with the competent piano ballad “The Rainy Night”. “Far” ramps up the pace again, introducing another barrage of militaristic percussion and deep bass as the chorus declares that they can’t be stopped. “Here’s an area, here’s an area” somehow ends up a belted line in that song — and Doyoung’s “three, two, one” in the bridge one of his slinkiest moments yet. “Bring the Noize” is another chant-heavy title with more attitude than melody and, with its car driving noises, marks a foreshadowing moment for NCT 127. After an abrupt end, there’s a section best described as fanservice: the ballad “Magic Carpet Ride”, the mildly upbeat “Road Trip” and the 70s pastiche “Dreamer”, all of which are okay but mark an obvious drop in quality, all their tricks revealed within an instant. Thankfully, though, the closer, “Promise You” is a track for fans, but its 80s synths, twinkling beats, and pulsating bass make it a far more engaging listen than most tracks of this caliber.

The repackage Favorite adds the charming “Pilot” and throbbing highlight “Love on the Floor” to the mix, adding to the album’s tracklist tremendously, the latter being a discography highpoint of cascading synths, autotuned raps, and “love on the floor” in the chorus feeling like a free fall, particularly when Jaehyun sings it. Another highlight: “life is a bastard” in lieu of an intro in Mark’s rap.

Sticker is the kind of album that stuck with me and revealed another new neat detail on each listen. Its competent production and stellar vocal moments of the tracks as well as its smart tracklisting feels a journey to get lost in, unlike Neo Zone’s idea of a prevailing mood and regular-irregular’s map to guide the listener through. Sticker stands out above the other albums because it doesn’t try to repeat some older highlights — you’d be hardpressed to find another repeat of “Replay” on here, and the closest one track sounds like another is “Promise You” with “Dreams Come True”, which is still quite the distance — and its run of great tracks is so large, spanning to nine of fourteen on the deluxe, that the back end being a little lighter in quality feels forgivable in comparison. The NCT 127 of Sticker straddles their adventurous and safe sides with ease, refusing to sacrifice one for the other. By the end, “Promise You” leaves at a satisfying high note, asking the listener to plunge headfirst into “Sticker” or “Favorite (Vampire)” all over again, just to hear how the group is great at both these things.

Universe (NCT)

The third full-length album by the overall group NCT

Release: December 14th, 2021

Lead single: “Universe (Let’s Play Ball)”

For the third overall unit album, NCT 127 gift “Earthquake”, a track that sounds like could have been a title track in an alternate NCT 127 release that we never got in 2021. “Earthquake” doesn’t do anything that’s too far from their usual fare. But the sitar warbling around here in conjunction with big percussion and bigger claps makes for a compelling sonic landscape. The members don’t have to do anything they haven’t done before: Jungwoo proves a good fit, as does Taeyong singing; but consider Yuta’s nasal baritone and Doyoung clear tenor work with and against the track respectively to great success. “Earthquake” is a track that plays to everyone’s strengths and never lets up on its energy and tension at any given point. In the music video, a literal earthquake triggers Doyoung awake (or maybe vice versa), and general mayhem breaks out. All the while, the other NCT 127 members are utterly calm about it, even welcome it. Nothing could describe their music better than this video.

2 Baddies / Ay-Yo

The fourth full-length album (and repackage)

Release: September 16th, 2022 (2 Baddies); January 30th, 2023 (Ay-Yo)

Lead single: “2 Baddies” (2 Baddies); “Ay-Yo” (Ay-Yo)

Performed B-sides: “Faster” (2 Baddies); “DJ” (Ay-Yo)

The best of 2 Baddies and corresponding deluxe Ay-Yo are undoubtedly career highlights. At the top of this list is the DemJointz-produced “Time Lapse”, which uses the beat in the verses of “Kick It” as a basis — that pristine piano chord — to an cosmopolitan lament of a broken relationship, a game of tension (those synths building up behind Taeyong’s chorus!) and release (a group of vocals dispelling it all of a sudden with “Can we fix it? Baby, can we fix it?”) that give the song a cinematic feeling. The song feels like a world unto its own, and each of the members singing inhabiting different protagonists, in a sort of Love Actually situation except they’re all being broken up with on a rainy day.

“Skyscraper”, from the deluxe, is another DemJointz production and goes the opposite direction, sounding like dropping from the sonic equivalent of the Burj Khalifa in the chorus, complete with an ominous bass and appropriately snippy percussion. It seamlessly segues to the even more villainous “Tasty”, featuring the impeccable line “we savage, outlaws, rock solid, no flaws” and a quasi-rap line from Doyoung that is almost as exhilarating as the chorus. The vocal performances across 2 Baddies are top notch — Haechan’s and Jungwoo’s touch are light and incredibly pretty on “Black Clouds”, “Gold Dust” features Doyoung at his airiest and most contemplative yet, while “Crash Landing” mixes both R&B and trap to a moody potion of romance on an effective chorus that makes good use of both chants and the fact that NCT 127 boasts six distinct, great vocalists.

But if 2 Baddies/Ay-Yo suffer from one major problem, is that a good portion of these tracks are inoffensively fine and don’t seek sonic adventure the same way other albums, even Neo Zone, did. In fairness, Sticker had tracks like those too — but therein lies the other problem, in how close this album feels to older albums in its ideas and tracklisting. Ominous opener “Faster” only exists to set the scene for a title, which is something no other NCT 127 release has. “Playback” is a playful track and uses metallic xylophones to build the synths, a 2022 update to “Welcome to my Playground” in some aspects. Deluxe track “DJ” is a very charming nod to Stevie Wonder, but an odd placement (sandwiched between “Time Lapse” and “Crash Landing”) prevents it from reaching its full potential within the album, a sudden burst of serotonin between a moody and a desperate-romantic song respectively. “Designer” seemingly opens with hard percussion and distorted brass before the record is rewound to another benign R&B offering that never returns to its introduction, except — of course — the rap in the bridge. Like in Sticker, “Vitamin”, “LOL (Laugh-Out-Loud)”, and “1,2,7 (Time Stops)” build the fanservice section that Sticker suffered from, too, with “LOL” standing out as the worst of these.

The portal that seemingly was opened way back in “Touch” and gave us We Are Superhuman has caught up with NCT 127 in the present time, it seems: they sound great and the production quality is top notch, but for an album title that communicates speed and ferocity in its Korean 질주, 2 Baddies/Ay-Yo plays things rather safe many times. Despite that, though, the highs are so high that it’s not hard to see why the whole album is a fan favorite. Can we fix it? The next full-length is slated to come out Q3 2023.

Continued on part three…

Introducing and spreading Hallyu throughout Asia wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to be the very architect of the K-Pop system, adapting a Motown model of fostering artists straight out of school and into the limelight with perfect faces, flawless mannerisms, and an ever-present cheerful smile. And the holograms certainly weren’t enough, the ones where Lee Soo-man — the founder of SM Entertainment — goes in and out of with an eerie synchronicity in his keynote titled New Culture Technology. The year was 2016, and K-Pop needed a change. As such, here was the “new” aspect of the culture technology that SM has fostered since its foundation: interaction, N for short. To really prove the point of this new culture technology, the new talent would have to show up to the presentation: masked boys wearing white clothes, surrounding the press. With EDM music blaring from the speakers and a projection of the whole world, some lights of which are pointed directly into some of the boys’ chests as dreams are mentioned in three different languages — Korean, Chinese, Japanese — , the artist group immediately put the Interaction into NCT. The group was to be called Neo Culture Technology. They would be everywhere: at your fingertips, certainly, but also somewhere in your area. Hallyu — Korean wave — would be fully localized. Things would start with Seoul, the birthplace of K-Pop, and spread as far as South America. All these boys appearing? It was just the beginning.

… Or so did Lee Soo-man imagine things would play out. Now in the year 2023, suffice to say that there’s only (”only”) four units of NCT — one of which the Tokyo subunit, announced all the way in 2016 and not even debuted yet — stalled at twenty-three members (plus the other couple members yet to debut). It did start in Seoul, though; indeed, the first subunit of NCT has the rounded-up longitude of Seoul in their name, 127. And, in a way that Lee Soo-man probably foresaw — just the way it happened with H.O.T, TVXQ, Super Junior, SHINee, and EXO — NCT 127 went on to change the sonic fabric of K-Pop. Theirs is a world where dreamy landscapes and lyrics about new worlds are matched with aggressive music with jarring musical ideas, where there’s as many chants as there are chords, where reacting to their music in extremes is the only appropriate reaction. Their music is the logical conclusion of holding attention by constantly demanding attention — that classic SM songwriting pushed into exciting new directions. NCT 127 is possibly responsible for everything wrong in K-Pop today; they are the culmination of everything K-Pop has to offer. Debuting in 2016 and consisting of leader and rapper Taeyong, vocalists Taeil, Johnny, Yuta, Doyoung, Jaehyun, Jungwoo, Haechan, and rapper Mark, NCT 127 are the final boss of boy groups.

The Origin, Synchronicity of your Dreams, The 7th Sense

How can you showcase technology that has yet to exist? Interstellar went deep on the scientific aspect; Blade Runner’s world of supersized advertisements and recordings of overblown pupils communicate more-so a vibe than possible technological advancements; Her is the real world in Tumblr-ready color palettes. Unveiled on the New Culture Technology showcase, the first three videos of NCT — and really, a lot of early NCT videography — has no answer for the technology. It does, however, deal with the interaction aspect of NCT and the uncanny factor of the NCT project altogether, and it does so by dealing in explicit dream logic. “The Origin,” the first of these, begins with a child actor lost in the desert, drawing a picture of a beach. A mother figure appears only to disappear. He passes out and eventually arrives to the beach he’s dreamt of. Turns out, though, that this is a dream of Winwin’s, who was part of the NCT 127 lineup from 2016 to 2020. The idea here — conjured by the Utterly Deranged, because why does a mother figure appear only to be swept in the wind? Why is that child left with nothing? — is that out of the desert landscape, a sea of new things emerges, imagined by a chosen few.

Though there is no music in The Origin, the idea of a dream connecting two real people together carries over to other NCT 127 music videos, and there is a clear connection from The Origin to Synchronicity to your Dreams, the desert child and Winwin… over to Taeyong, who wakes up gripping sand. First order of business is to follow the sand. Second order of business: get the leather jacket on and start to dance. What is heard here is “The 7th Sense”, sung by Taeyong, Jaehyun, Mark, Doyoung, and Haechan and performed by Taeyong, Hansol (an former SM trainee originally slated to debut with NCT), Ten (of the Chinese NCT unit WayV), Mark, and Jaehyun. The sand is paired with cold fluorescent lights, a hallway with a new member picking up where the last left off. Each are in their own corridor: one with a horse, one with house plants, two with brick walls. It eventually leads to a defunct swimming pool where the whole group dances. Open your eyes, Taeyong drawls with the assists of Doyoung and Haechan, quietly open your eyes. His dream of the desert led him to more dryness, an uncanny place that no human besides construction workers should access. Such is the synchronicity of dreams, of bodies in dance.

The final section, titled the same way as the song though not featuring it, has Winwin drink tea and dance with grace and fluidity in an Eastern set. When he finishes, he feels the sea breeze, and the child’s mother touching his hair, and the connection to another man in another time.

The 7th Sense (NCT U)

The five members that originally sang the very first NCT song all went on to become members of NCT 127 (and Mark and Haechan to NCT Dream as well). Though it’s attributed to NCT U, its soundscape and visuals make a canny prototype for what NCT 127 would expand upon later: trap. As trap started to dominate the US charts, it leaped over to Korea, particularly emboldened by Mnet shows like Show Me The Money. SM decided to add their particular flourishes to the globally popular genre.

What eventually was released as “The 7th Sense” in April 2016 featured one different member: Ten instead of Haechan. Without the latter’s vocals, the song — firmly entrenched in trap with a languid bass and a skittering wooden snare — feels more muted somehow, darker. There is an aggression to it here, simmering at the back, as if the cold world from which Taeyong closes his eyes is at fault for being so distant. At its peak, it still remains close to but not actually breaking through the surface, and it’s when Mark goes, and that’s a long-ass ride, with a speed and command that still feels preternatural for a Korean pop idol. In the teaser, all of the members stand inside a glass case of what looks like the inside of a hammam. Doyoung looks at the camera through a reflection, while Taeyong is surrounded by blue fluorescent lights and radiates dry ice through the air. All the blue light, combined with the members in such thin glass bring about a strong visual image: the idol on your screen, just a touch away. Other supporting elements are interspersed with quick cuts: the extremely vibrant colors, member profiles in double exposure, intricate choreography, glass breaking.

In the lyrics, Jaehyun sings of the same dream, a familiar song that connects “us”. This dream — and by extension, the song — saves the protagonist, someone trapped by past and present, uncertain of the connection between dream and reality, from his eternal slumber, and awakens his seventh sense, something so supernatural that we’re long past the sixth. In this dream, everyone is like him, and he can communicate with ease. But the bridge doesn’t sound euphoric: there’s a dazed feeling to it, as if tripping into a new world in some kind of trance, a pied piper beckoning the protagonist to forget. Their seventh sense is a sense of direction: somewhere far away where reality can’t hurt our protagonist anymore.

“The 7th Sense” didn’t necessarily predict idol message platforms. It was part of SM’s game plan already, and they had an app called Vyrl (pronounced “Viral”) and ROOKIES (of SM’s Rookies) that had functions designed to bring idol fantasy and fan money together. But eventually, they would interact through the touch of a screen, be it through VLive (launched 2015), Instagram Lives, and subscription-based app Lysn. One of the functions of Lsyn was Bubble, on which idols could chat to fans as if they were really talking to one another. Lysn was created by SM, unsurprisingly. It eventually ceded to Hybe’s Weverse, an evolved form of the idol-fan platform.

Without You (NCT U)

Doyoung doesn’t know that this is a dream, though his big smile and wide eyes tell us that he feels like he’s in one: after all, he has his girl by his side, running with her and grabbing some snacks. Sure, occasionally he dazes off, but that’s just lack of sleep, and with her, that doesn’t happen. Taeil has been there: in fact, his dream — his time during the dream — is a jail of his own making, flashbacks within flashbacks that he can’t pull himself out of, back when he and the girl were together as children. Jaehyun would know: he dreams being Doyoung, inhabiting his body; he also enters Taeil’s body for a while. Time jumps and warps until it has no meaning whatsoever, a train track coming from and going to nowhere. The girl is dreaming, too: of needles, IV drips, rows and rows of school banks. (And then there’s Winwin in the train; you get the sense that SM really wanted to center him prominently in NCT’s music video universe, and it never panned out.) Everything is connected, interacting, but nobody said that the connection could be done in a lucid manner; all members look dazed one way or another, even the mostly-awake Doyoung, and they can’t stop this other reality from happening to themselves. NCT 127 (and this, too, is NCT 127) would end up with music video imagery more trippy than this, operating on even stronger dream logic than “Without You” does, a music video already plenty trippy, uninterested to explain or conclude anything. But the dazed eyes on Jaehyun, who is confused about being awake in a dream, and the equally absent-looking Taeil (probably sleep-deprived, as we find out in the music video behind) leave a strong impression.

The song is produced by Yoo Youngjin, architect of many iconic SM tracks; Taeil is a worthy match to his demo vocals, especially in those soaring high vocals near the end. But Jaehyun, a conventional vocalist in SM at the time, and Doyoung, whose crystal clear tones make a perfect balance between the two, are no slackers, either. This is a track that sounds a little like a Coca-Cola advertisement in the vocals and generally upbeat markings of EDM drums and electric guitars. But what a force it creates. It’s adrenaline shot directly into the ear, the type of track that could make you fly by sheer force of will, turn every single moment to a moment fitting a main character. The track invites to dream into Inception-like dreams within dreams. Together with “The 7th Sense”, it forms the other pillar of NCT 127 music: electric guitars. Not exactly rock — never fully rock — but it does serve as the distillation of SM’s forays into rock and metal music since at least TVXQ.

Fire Truck

In the New Culture Technology keynote, Lee Soo-man says: “If you have enjoyed SM’s music and performance during the time of our first idol group [H.O.T] grew to become a mother of two children, you will definitely experience a more profound and broad world through various music, contents and new culture that SM and SM’s celebrities will make from now on.” What a thought: you start out as a fan of H.O.T as a teenager and end up a mother of two children still bleeding SM’s color, pink. Why stop there, though? You could still be an SM fan as a grandmother, and SM will still be there for your grandchildren. We’re all bleeding pink, God-SM willing. That’s the idea behind NCT 127’s debut music video, “Fire Truck”. Our main lead, a white girl, builds sandcastles at the playground. But there are her personal seven demons, boys in odd clothing and odder hair styles towering over her, spraying her sandcastle down with hoses. She grows up and goes to school; they are there, perennially young and odd, interrupting chemistry class. They’re here when she’s trying to kiss a boy with a vacant stare; they’re there in a 90s office as she gets a stern talking to by her supervisor; when she’s got married and had kids. But, as the bridge helpfully points out, NCT 127 only had good intentions: there was a lit match near the sandbox; something was boiling in chemistry class; the boy didn’t want her, it was a dare and money was involved; somebody was about to steal company data with a floppy disk; there was water near the plug. In the end, they’re looking over her grandchild while she sleeps (or is dead). God-SM willed NCT 127 to exist forever, and they will always look odd.

As a debut, “Fire Truck” is immensely spirited and grabs your attention from the first Get it lifted! on. The percussion bubbles in what’s no doubt inspired by the late SOPHIE, taking most of the chorus in a satisfying climax. Yes, there’s sirens akin to an actual firetruck, there’s members imitating horns (“WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! Fire truck.”) and horns swirling in the mix. Jaehyun shifts over to rap here, leaving Haechan (a high-pitched tenor) and Taeil to the prechorus. The song functions great as a performance-heavy track, whether that’s the group or the listener in some club. It’s absolutely obnoxious, a clear successor to Big Bang’s 2015 “Bang Bang Bang”. But it keeps melodic elements intact, its instrumental break supports the song rather than detract it, and as a result, “Fire Truck” has staying power in the ear. It’s one of their most conventional titles, and not moving while the song plays becomes a challenge. Why resist, though? As they say in the bridge: dance, my party people!

Limitless

The performance music video is janky, cutting between members and unit shots too much too soon, zooms to and fro as if the director was giddy at the possibility that NCT 127 are one part of something larger, a unit that has no beginning and no ending. There’s a couple lingering shots of new members Doyoung and Johnny, the former wide-eyed and wearing a beanie to really frame the eyes, the latter half-lidded and angular, oozing distanced cool. In the Rough version, they are in a room of an abandoned warehouse, standing next to one another, Johnny to the left and Doyoung to the right. Johnny turns to Doyoung as he lipsyncs to the track. Doyoung’s eyes are on the camera. It’s as if he stares past it, and directly to the viewer — in one moment, he holds a glowing book above his head, and it’s just those eyes, part expectation, part surprise, part vacant.

It’s an uncanny effect that much of the Rough version replicates through grainy camcorder footage, footage within footage, unfocused close-ups, members cut off the frame. Various NCT 127 members do something and abruptly stop when they notice the camera. They all cover their eyes with their hands; all turn around at the same time; all break out to dance at random moments. Change the heavy world, Jaehyun says, and there’s a cut of Taeil from the bridge only to cut again to a night scene with sparklers moving around in harmony. Jaehyun sings along to the bridge only to stop at some point to chew gum. It’s disconcerting, almost from a dream. Accordingly, “Limitless” opens with Taeyong chanting: “The dream last night that shook my world / is it a nightmare or am I still inside of it?” as if chanting that two people sit on a tree. Rough ver. is the nightmare. It is a world unto itself, that warehouse. And all the members stare expecting the viewer to know this, too.

In 2016, EXO’s third album EX’ACT, featuring the double lead singles “Monster” and “Lucky One” presented the most extreme forms of the EXO formula: the strongest take of their loud, aggressive music on one side, and their melodic, shimmering pop sensibilities on the other. EX’ACT featured “Artificial Love” right after those two tracks, a propulsive dance track produced by MZMC originally meant for NCT (I like to think you can hear it). For their second single, “Monster” producer Kenzie offered a second take of the song for NCT 127, and you hear parts of that in “Limitless”: a militaristic precision in drum loops and vocals, a certain desperation. But “Monster” only touches on its militaristic nature; its chorus reveals a satisfactory climax of drama and yearning. The chorus of “Limitless”, meanwhile, has all the members sing in a choir. The percussion is a perfect trap drill. The bass snakes through the song, adding to the ominous vibe. When an individual steps forward — Taeyong here, Johnny there — the choir immediately reels them back in, fusing them back to a limitless “me”, singing a song that is only getting louder, in an explosive world stretching from East to West that fuses the protagonist and the listener to one. EXO’s world is one of binaries: you and me, goddesses and monsters. NCT 127’s world — that hardened world, the heavy world that needs changing — limits are pieces to erode through sheer willpower. Dream is reality, tomorrow is today, the world is a nightmare or vice versa, you are me. Eventually, we’re all connected, Doyoung sings in the bridge as though this is the most obvious thing in the world: you know this. Taeil, not much later, sings of finding the ocean at the end of a desert — the child’s reality, the seventh sense, Taeyong’s dream. All is connected, and infinity will be achieved eventually. It’s an assault of a track. It is one of their best.

Cherry Bomb

A slimy beat that dominates the song, chanting in the chorus — or really on just about any auditory surface available, which is quite a lot, as it turns out. With a synth line that sounds like an empty hallway just before all the lights turn out one by one in a horror movie, this is not a track in which you and I come together to erode all limits to infinite ourselves. This track is about having bombs for meal, being the biggest hit on the stage, cherries in the sky high. If you happy and you know it, clap your hands, yo, one of the most ridiculous lines intoned in K-Pop, is said here in the most threatening tone imaginable — as a hook. Very few singing, an entire bridge devoted to Mark rapping: “Cherry Bomb” defines NCT 127’s discography in the collective imagination through one succinct punch of a song. The biggest hit on the stage: originally a phrase that Johnny said to cheer himself up at a difficult choreography, “Cherry Bomb“ turns it to something akin to the Eleventh Commandment. “Cherry Bomb” marks the first time American producer DemJointz produces a track for NCT 127, and it’s without his iconic “Incoming” producer tag (back then, it was And now, the breakdown in the middle eight). The collaboration wouldn’t end there, though — far from it. “Cherry Bomb” is one fantastic foundation of it all, and remains one of their best songs still, both DemJointz’s and NCT 127’s.

Though the song itself has little to do with new worlds, the music video freely mixes heat vision with real vision, animation that washes over the screen only to harden in big pixels. Members glitch out of and into existence, are zoomed in and out, and don’t look like they were originally having fun in that warehouse; this is the hall from which NCT 127 declare their world dominance. A song like “Cherry Bomb” could only make sense in the coldest environment imaginable, where you could be dragged while sitting on a sofa like Johnny is in the music video. The music video portrays the kind of urban malaise where you live at the very fringes of the metropolis, where your local spot is a local grocery store, really a shitty piece of concrete. The biggest fun you can have comes from blowing up cherry bombs? No matter. Eventually, giant cherries will fall from the sky. And still you’re the biggest hit on the stage.

Limitless - Japanese Version, Chain

For the Japanese version of “Limitless”, the ETUI Collective connected some of the imagery of the original music video — the grainy footage, the strong usage of red, urban decay as background setting — with ideas on their own that built of the idea of infinity: tapes that wound and rewound, a television perpetually on, bodies in motion on a staircase zoomed from up. The eroding borders are now literal, what with curtains burning and members disappearing within — so suffice to say that this is dreamy, but more concerned with angularity. It doesn’t immediately grab like the original Korean music video. ETUI Collective has stronger and better material with NCT 127, so “Limitless” makes for a good first taste. I do enjoy seeing Jaehyun lipsync Taeyong’s “baby I want nobody but you”, though.

The path “Limitless” opened up went both ways.. One hand, it was in the music videos: set in an urban landscape, videos filled with various beauty shots and rave-like situations, all of it bordering on something akin to a dream, but the Japanese discography in general that pushed towards NCT 127’s electronic side. Their first original single for the Japanese market, the music video for “Chain” combines flowers inside a well-lit fluorescent truck, backgrounds of dawn with stark elevators. When Johnny lifts up a chainsaw, its sonic equivalent doesn’t fall far behind. There’s a franticness to “Chain”, both the song and the music video, as though it can’t contain the beauty for too long lest it ultimately succumb to the electric screwdrivers going off. It makes the From Seoul and to Tokyo beauty shots that marks that each member dons on their faces all the more worthy of a contrast. The song itself is a drill (ha!) of a hook, stacking them on top of one another to great success.

Touch

There comes a time in SM groups’ discographies where the lore doesn’t seem feasible, where the company cedes to the wishes of the fans and hands the group a “cute” concept, or maybe altogether makes them more palatable so more people can become fans of the group. Later, the lore can come back — it often did — but the one moment of normalcy (or two…) leaves a bookmark for non-fans and ex-fans years later that has them say, “maybe if they did this more often.” For the 2018 NCT project, every NCT unit did NCT 127 things… except 127 itself, which decidedly went pop — or a form of pop, anyway. “Touch” utilizes doo-wop-esque harmonies locked in a teeth-grit battle with the rhythm. When one charges forward, the other disappears. A “Growl” or even “Hello” this is not. But aren’t they all just so cute. Wow, Taeyong is smiling on a music video. Look how cute Yuta can be when he isn’t glaring at the camera! They’re pulling a rope… and you’re on the other end! The N of NCT stands for iNteraction! I’m whelmed!

Years later, Doyoung would go on an interview and say that after this song, the group made the decision to do weird music. For that reason alone, Touch makes for an indelible inclusion into the NCT 127 canon.

Regular

I once woke myself up from a nightmare and got so dizzy my brain conjured an image of my hand stretched out in front of my eyes; in reality, it was under my pillow. (The dream last night that shook my world…) This same space — being half-awake and half-asleep, stuck between reality and dream, nightmare and ambition, is one that NCT 127 explore a lot in their titles and music videos. Haus of Team (then known as a team under Dazed Korea magazine), directing the opening trailers for NCT 127’s first full length record Regular-Irregular, makes this connection literal: an escape from the boring, regular corporate life, towards an irregular one — a place where you can mix up wine with cherry tomatoes, read comics under your office desk with stuffed toys all around you, printing out money just by scanning your face. That there’s members who are so good-looking that the regularity aspect becomes a tough sell is part of the point.

Lead single “Regular”, a fun track that is liberally inspired by Cardi B’s smash hit “I Like It”, has two music videos for its two versions, with very little differing between the two. Winwin jumps off a building earlier in the Korean version; Mark walks with a CGI tiger earlier in the English version. The idea remains the same: the city as an endless possibility, as colorful as a kaleidoscope at night with all the neon lights around, a place you can enter with enough riches (and they do, as sung in the English version; the Korean is more about how cool the team is). Cars, as a status symbol, plays an important role for the first time — much later, an entire lead single would be centered around them. The dizzying, blurred images in the English version make “Regular” seem like a dream. This isn’t happening, and once again, what is happening is barred to Gokart rounds and on top of a roof where nobody else is around. What a sad, regular life that is. How fun a night out can be in all its irregularity.

Simon Says

Since the beginning, NCT hinges on Taeyong: his sharp features and warm eyes give his visuals a manga character edge. Then there is the preciseness of his dancing and his drawling rap, a natural fit for the trap of the NCT soundscape. It makes sense, then, to see him first in “Simon Says”, pulling up a chair as the other members circle around him with elaborate masks on. “Simon Says”: the warehouse from which they’ve once declared their world domination has now simultaneously shrunk (it barely looks like a studio when Taeyong walks in) and expanded, becoming a giant conference room from which Winwin, the last time he’s in a NCT 127 release, is pulled away from into an endless void. There is a designer car in a small room where it couldn’t race. The world dominance in question has become step one of an already fulfilled plan: lines like Cast a spell, I’m God and Who can talk against me, who? / Bless me, achoo suggest that the group is on a plane of existence hitherto hinted at in previous releases: a godlike existence wrapped in an auditory trancelike haze that may or may not have a maleficent energy. In the end, they step on the masks, and the credits flash.

A spiritual sequel to “Cherry Bomb”, “Simon Says” is even less accessible, even deeper in its own mythology, and all the better for it. A trap song that still retains some pop ideas, the sole instrumentation at the back is various distorted percussion and a second bubblier one – nevertheless, the chorus explodes at the right moment, and “Mine mine mine mine mine” makes for an intense, hypnotizing chant. Vocals are distorted, sidelined for the big rapping and great attitude. In various interviews, the group talks about the intense nature of this track, but also its aspirational quality: that it’s about “tapping into the real you” and seizing the moment. That moment occurs at the climax: Don’t be afraid, the only one stopping you is yourself, Doyoung sings gently. Fall deep inside that moment in which, Taeil continues a little later, you find your true self between reality and dream, sung as if he’s going to find that true self right this instant. But between reality and dream, though, is a space seemingly only ever visited by NCT 127. The gods of the trance state get so bored of their solitary existence that they play characters that obey this god. “Simon says we’re the real vibe killer” as a chorus line doesn’t make sense at face value, only as declaration that Simon is the god of the game, and you better not disturb him too much. Who is Simon? It could be them, but it could be you, too.

Wakey-Wakey

One moment, they want you to find your true self between dream and reality and the next they want you to wake up. Men! “Wakey-Wakey” is the kind of Charli XCX-esque rave that NCT 127 made their calling card in their Japanese discography. The successor to “Chain”, “Wakey-Wakey”’s main conceit is an earworm so metallic and catchy that its bludgeoning effect works like a charm. There’s a bouncy energy to “Wakey-Wakey” that is never interrupted. The vocals are all over the song, mixed roughly the same way as the beeping synth line.

The music video adds to the beautiful-edgy imagery of “Chain”: member closeups glitch out ever so slightly, just enough to make the picture even more beautiful. There are cars again, this time not in the same place as flowers. Haechan is in the middle of a exhibition area, asleep. The others are maybe also asleep and just wake up: there’s a lot of opening eyes. It’s suggested that they have superpowers, or at least Taeil’s coffee rises up on its own from the cup. Doyoung wears a ring with eye motif, the diamond studded version to the one he wore in “Limitless”’s performance music video. Everyone is trying to wake up Haechan. Do they succeed in it? Find out before the music video cuts to the performance box that looks like so many of SM’s older music videos. Haechan, meanwhile, must be living his true self between dream and reality: the world blurs around him when he maybe-sorta wakes up. Hard not to when this song is playing. Johnny commands it so: “Wake up right now. You gotta wakey…”

Highway to Heaven, Superhuman

“Highway to Heaven” is the kind of neon-drenched, high-sheen slowburn drama that was already familiar to audiences before NCT 127 did it— it’s as though someone Scandinavic had heard the tropical house wave and chosen to write a song for the Eurovision Song Contest (for Sweden, naturally). The wide shots utilized in the music video reflects the cinematic scope of “Highway to Heaven”, but by and large it is a song completely devoid of anything that NCT 127 had done before (even “Touch”!) What’s so upsetting about the rare times NCT 127 employs a mainstream pop sound is that NCT 127 has been posited as weird, off-kilter, even inaccessible music — that moment of twenty boys in masks surrounding journalists at the press conference is not exactly the normal way to introduce a new group. NCT 127 means sonic and visual spectacle, one that isn’t supposed to make sense the first time. “Highway to Heaven” makes sense — sometimes charmingly so, like in the chorus, oftentimes offensively so, which is everything else.

“Superhuman”, the actual release of the American-marketed EP We are Superhuman, is as accessible as “Highway to Heaven” is, but in a distinct K-Pop way. The electronic bass that ran through “Highway to Heaven” are on prominent display with Superhuman in a way that distinctly recalls efforts by senior group SHINee, particularly “Everybody” — a Motown-inspired vocal melody that bursts at the seams with synths all around them to aspirational goals of achieving someone’s goals and finding/revealing your true self. The music video isn’t exactly clear in what ways NCT 127 are superhuman — there’s infinite amounts of Doyoung one moment, and the next, he’s sitting behind keyboards with that wide-eyed look of his. There’s Jaehyun and Jungwoo suspended in air. There’s a very futuristic and good-looking Taeyong in a corridor that looks like a rave happened inside a spaceship. But one gets the job done. “Superhuman” is a forceful and energetic song, but again offers little on what makes NCT 127 special. Just enough fuel, though, for fans to want this sound back whenever NCT 127 got abrasive again… which they would, but almost a year after the fact.

Kick It

The song was originally called Bruce Lee, or at least that’s what the members call the song as they record it. He’s namechecked in every chorus and even in one verse: “Andi’mgonnakickitlikeBruceLee”, no spaces, in one breath. His martial philosophy Jeet Kune Do and last film Enter The Dragon are namechecked in the rap section, but other than that, Bruce Lee, who passed away at 32 in 1973, is relegated to mentions of bass kicks that swing like him. Other moves of note: punching left and right, flying all day, fighting for all day. (Also, per Jaehyun’s line that he intones with the casual boredom of an endboss: “Dropping a bomb on my enemies…”) The title this song was eventually released in, both English and Korean, underscore the almost superhuman power of Bruce Lee’s stunts: Hero in Korean, Kick It in English.

The song brings NCT 127 back to the territory of sonic assault: metal riffs that have nothing to do with the genre, aggressive chanting, spitfire rapping, trap drums, but also piano notes and a drill in the verses. In the lyrics there is, once again, stuff about finding your true self, moving forward (no more trauma!), making new worlds, all through violence. Unsurprisingly, DemJointz is back to helm it. It’s not his most abrasive work, not his masterpiece, with NCT 127 just yet, but it is the strongest, and even if that’s just off the bridge’s alone — the part where Taeil’s voice, declaring that he’s reborn in the dark, becomes one with strings and warped synths going as the same riff as the metal one in the chorus, and a robotic “Oh-okay”. Then the chorus comes back for the last time with a “shimmy shimmy shimmy hoo!”, totally lost to feeling. This is the new thangs they keep chanting about. This is what Haechan means in his verse when he says, “Baby, you can’t understand this feeling logically.”

Bruce Lee and his legacy do hover more strongly in the music video, positioning NCT 127 as martial arts movie heroes — or maybe villains, the way Jaehyun, wearing a luxurius piece of cloth with a deep V-cut, looks smolderingly at the camera. There is life and death at stake here: Taeil sits against a motorcycle only to later have all motorcycles pointed at him as he sings in the rain; the camera pans wide to reveal Johnny defeating masked cyclers; there’s shots of various NCT 127 members wielding nunchucks, kicking, sending enemies flying just like they declare in the song. (No bombs, though.) In the bridge — that bridge of new thangs — the rain stops and moves on only when Taeyong snaps his fingers. The city — Neo Zone, like the album that “Kick It” is the lead single of — is one of pure violence. To survive is to fight your way up. It is a world of yellow and of rain. You fight for all day. (Notably, Doyoung is never seen fighting, only looking sad with yellow neon lights behind him.) You make your own world. In the darkness, you’re reborn. We go wild, 127 squad, we’ll show you new thangs, they say. And they do.

Punch

“Punch” turns the world of “Kick It” to pure artifice within an instant, and all of it has to do with calling the release of the repackage album FINAL ROUND. In the world of wrestling, villains and heroes come together to one satisfying showdown where the only thing that matters is raw power (or, as it’s said in the song, styles make a fight). The second and final round of Neo Zone, then, extends the round by having Doyoung sing, “My show goes on.” Accordingly, there’s horns, big drums, and the loud chanting that appeared last time on Kick It. But there’s also that bassline, sounding like the buzz of a CRT television come to life, as the members… whisper on it. The song isn’t exactly brief at 3:24, but sounds like it’s done within an instant, an aggressive track that didn’t capitalize on either the loudest or the most villainous of NCT 127’s capabilities. On initial release, people said they didn’t remember how the song went; hard not to when there’s little besides whispering in the verses, a little singing in the prechorus, and loud chanting in the chorus. This is still not the most extreme that NCT 127 would get, but perhaps a good sign for what was to truly come. Musically, they were already pushing to the very ends of K-Pop — they say it in the song too: “As high as we can get / As loud as we can get / The trend will be set”, though whether they did set a trend with whispering through “Punch” or not is questionable.

As is the case with other NCT 127 titles, here, too, are mentions of new worlds: “My own universe, a very long fight in it” goes one line, and “You’re my only exit” — far from calling someone to their world, the gods of trance seek to fight their way out of it. (They lose, but A for effort.) Several members appear in washed-out, psychedelic backgrounds, looking battered and bruised and still choosing to fight their way out by punching at the camera, while others are in a hallway sitting contemplatively. The music video blurs the line of reality, but not to dreamlike effect this time, rather a zone in which the punches are the only thing that matters and everything else washes out like colors activated in water. If “Kick It” was very bright, this one is either dark or in various shades of blue, furthering the idea of “Punch” as a complementary color rather than a straightforward sequel. In the dream world that they’re in, the long fight may not end, but at least they’ll do it without regrets. Maybe they’re not villains on this one, but protagonists, a sound that is slightly awkward on them; either way, their show goes on.

gimme gimme

“gimme gimme” answers a question I never knew I had: what if “The Seventh Sense” married “Wakey-Wakey” and they had a child? The answer is that this child somehow ends up the perfect mix of its parents: the sludgy, slow pace mixed with industrial beats and rave-like sounds. The latter keeps on happening even while the other members are actually singing verses and raps and choruses on it, even in the break, in which there’s even more electronic moments happening. Just like the song itself, the music video only has nondescreipt sets it freely swaps between: the backroom of some engineering place, though it’s unclear where; another corridor with nothing but metals in which only Taeyong and Mark appear in; two studios; the backside of a construction site. When another member takes the place, there’s the same effect as Twilight vampires teleporting. One moment, it’s Taeyong, and the next, it’s Johnny, coolly looking at the camera.

Though it reveals most of its tricks from its first chord on, the song has a hypnotizing quality to it. It is also the song where Taeyong uses the line “spicy disease,” and a case for NCT’s most romantic lead single can be made with this song — with the usual aggressive charm of their soundscape. Machines can fall in love, too, and talk of king’s games and magic spells. gimme gimme’s ghost in the machine is the beautiful vocal work in the middle of it all, particularly from Doyoung in his few lines. The desperate quality of gimme gimme shines through through the trance-like state of the machine. Even in a song that isn’t about other worlds, NCT 127 always sound like they try to reach someone else from across the screen through sheer willpower.

Save

From the late 2000s on, SM groups have collaborated with various brands, with a surefire deal that benefited both parties: ad songs, which brought coin to the group and exposure to the product. Girls’ Generation has a whole host of advertisement tracks and endorsement deals. Most notable to the NCT 127 Potpourri here is the track Girls’ Generation to advertise the newest processing cores from Intel that rolled out early 2011 and boasted dual and quad core-variants: Visual Dreams, a song with Kraftwerk-esque synthesizers and singtalking most of the time. It is pure electropop euphoria and stands apart from the rest of Girls’ Generation’s discography — too digitized to belong to their Korean catalogue, too robotic to take place in their Japanese discography. Fortunately for NCT 127, “Save” — the track advertising Samsung’s DRAM — isn’t very far from their stellar lead singles. In fact, its house elements fulfill an early promise of their discography way back with “Fire Truck” and their first mini album: the idea of NCT as a musical project for the club. The chorus pops the tension of the pre-chorus in a satisfying manner, and the flutes work tremendously well with the spoken word “Save you, save me, save our memo-ries”.

As one of their best tracks in their discography, Save manages to not only pack in environmental issues (too many satellites above, saving memories), vague references to a RAM (storing in the same way a RAM would read and write memory into the same location), but also brings back the universe as NCT 127’s stage. Their stage is the universes, they’re going space opera! The same idea persists in the music video, which is either a space station that is overgrown with plants if they just generate RAM (a blue square on which is a blue pictogram of… a floppy disk?) from the palm of their hands and insert it on some dashboard. Alternatively, they’re inside a dome in which NCT 127 dance and look at the camera with the expectation that they’ll be freed from the cage. There’s also a glass box on which Jaehyun often leans against but is never inside of. One way or another, everything is “The 7th Sense”; one way or another, everything is neo culture technology. (Samsung, at the time of this writing, is on track of developing 16GB DDR5 RAM — faster and cheaper RAM.)

Sticker

At the end of the Who is STICKER video, the introduction to the third full-length album by NCT 127, we are none the wiser at answering the question the title poses. Not unlike the Regular-Irregular introduction, Who is STICKER separates a NCT 127 that are “normal” computer science students (un-compsci-esque nerd cosplay, unnerdy good looks and an abundance of glasses aside, you do not use soldering iron without solder, but points for featuring it) and one that is dark and wired in. Take this literally: the room drops in lighting considerably, Haechan is tangled up in various cables, and Jungwoo plugs in something into a laptop which then makes the laptop screen flash the number 127. Plugged in, with a new screen, they are the life of the party… and the party this time is on computer screens, in lines of code. Nothing glitches out here, because these computer science students know better than to release code with bugs.

Roll up to the party: in the world of “Sticker”, the party is a world of outlet stores and improbable cowboys. Duels are made by biting the lower lip and throwing hats. Hearts, glasses and even mannequins are shot at, lassos are thrown, cars buckle up like horsepower contains actual horses inside. And dogs can be cowboys, too. The video almost looks benign next to the song, a cacophony with very little regard for traditional structure or anything that K-Pop fans seek out in a song. It’s driven by two things that it immediately reveals to the listener: the flute — that flute — and a strange, slinky bass followed immediately after. A wooden percussion trickles along. Sometimes, piano plays. Members sing over this barebones melody with a classic Yoo Youngjin melody without a care in the world (though, in reality, a good amount of them looked like they had no idea what to make of this song the first time they heard it). What does the song even communicate? Falling in love, a force so big it could collide two worlds, and on this planet, we call it L-O-V-E. Sure. But also: declaring the listener both scribe of their history and the protagonists of masterpieces. The lyrics give off the feeling that Sticker is about the exhilarating feeling of being a fan of a group for the first time, its reciprocal energy at performances.

That’s not how it sounds, though. It sounds a little like some people decided to make music after some apocalypse rendered humanity with no access to instruments, only a percussion, a flute, and some piano. It has no relation to anything released in 2021. Yoo Youngjin — who Taeil emulates with absolute ease in the chorus adlib — and DemJointz fused the best of their abilities to this towering track. And it all culminates in the best thirteen seconds in NCT 127’s title track catalogue: the futuristic, synth-y explosion where the flute steps out of line and the percussion gets metallic and thunders to the climax, and all that’s said is to roll up to the party. Forget new worlds. Dreams are useless. We’re all rolling up to the party. They told us to dance, “my party people”, all the way back in 2016. It’s a good thing they say “you” are the protagonist of this masterpiece. Thanks, NCT 127!

Favorite (Vampire)

Taeyong simply knows that there’s a butterfly there. Maybe he pretended to sleep all this time — or maybe he’s supernatural and senses the butterfly like an anime character in full control of ki. He doesn’t even open his eyes, just his mouth, revealing fangs, and letting the butterfly enter his mouth wholesale. The butterfly, in turn, brings us to a new world. The world — perhaps it’s better to call it worlds — contains thorns, apples, bathtubs filled with blood, fields full of roses, glitter, abysses… more butterflies… but most notably, it has vampires of the Twilight kind: ones with creepy eyes, with the ability to teleport and glitter dramatically. A striking Jaehyun reveals fresh bite marks and sings “Your love is dangerous and incomplete” with a little sway as if he was just bitten, and it adds to the idea of the protagonist being both victim and perpetrator of something so worth it that the violence is a prerequisite to the end. That “something”, as it is usually the case, is love.

“Favorite (Vampire)”, the third song that Kenzie wrote for NCT 127 (and co-produced with legendary producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins) delves deep into the pain: the members give a yearning, impassionate performance throughout the track (even a line like, “you are my favorite” sounds like it’s said with the final breath of someone close to dying), with a militaristic percussion just like “Limitless” giving the song its marching beat. This track, as it turns out, was almost a title for EXO’s repackaged sixth album, which was scrapped. It’s hard to hear EXO on this, though some sonic ideas of theirs are present somewhat in “Favorite”. The song is stunning — a whistle guiding most of the song come hell or high water, contemplative in the verses (with an almost hilariously over-the-top hmm peppered throughout), explosive in the chorus — but its insistence to overwhelm with the most pain possible almost feel at odds with the usual NCT 127 fare, less futuristic and more fantastical. Not that this deterred Doyoung: on the release of the song, he shared a lengthy Instagram story about how much he liked the song. He has many beautiful moments on this track, especially in the bridge. He also looks otherworldly in the music video. But “Favorite” feels patchy as a video, and not exactly in the incoherent way of a dream. There is more an attempt to maximize the individuality of these beauty shots. There are fragments that are beautiful: that rapid blinking of Yuta’s eyes revealing something inhuman, the closeups of Johnny and Jaehyun. If there was a synchronization of dreams before, this is the atomization of it. Which of these nightmares shook Taeyong’s world? By the time the butterfly is out of Taeyong’s mouth, he’s sleeping again. We’ll never know.

2 Baddies

Ahead of the release of new title “2 Baddies”, which came almost a year after “Favorite” did, the group mentioned that this was their most “NCT 127” title yet. Musically, it is true — there was a formula now, one that other groups copied to little success, so anytime when NCT 127 came back, they could simply remind everyone why this formula exists in the first place. Perhaps that’s unfair to say of a group that is so singular in its musical abilities — but it’s not a bad thing to sound like yourself, and to “2 Baddies”’ (major!) credit, there is a great energy to the song, a jovial attitude that was not present in NCT 127 lead singles before. The lyrics never make too much sense (”Too fast, T_T / movement is Blues Clues” is a particularly puzzling one), but a general impression can be made: driving fast, being a baddie with a Porsche (changed in performances to “squad”), and setting the tone. All of this has been covered in previous NCT 127 songs before.

Perhaps what lends the song such a joy is the fact that they no longer need to prove their godhood or declare world domination. They’re there already, ahead of everyone else. A high speed implies an inverse proportion to the anxiety of crashing somewhere, and NCT 127 never crash the track. Even the energetic middle eight, their fifth (sixth if you count the breakdown in the “Favorite” music video) in a lead single of theirs, sounds familiar in a good way. We’re truly done dreaming. This is reality…

…is something I’d say, except the music video is a trip and a half. Acidic colors leak from the screen. Members are in neon lit tunnels sporting odd hats and stranger canes (or, in Jaehyun’s case, a leather jacket). They perform the song under a giant car body, as if it was a dinosaur fossil. Yuta drives an elevator up in an animated world behind him. Doyoung is driving a car as if he could singlehandedly travel through time with the car. On his wheels he brings “Cherry Bomb”’s hand-drawn aesthetic to 2022, so fast that it makes his entire body shake. Johnny, chest wide open, looks at the camera as if he already expects the question why he’s in the passenger seat to a car seemingly driving by itself. And the bridge: when fluorescent paint appears on Jaehyun’s, Taeyong’s, Johnny’s, and Yuta’s body, as they dance in the dark tunnel and flash grills, Doyoung’s “Nothing can stand in our way” feels like an understatement somehow. What do you do when you’re at the top? Sit on your throne, dance on the roof with a car body swinging on top of you, and watch everyone else struggle.

Ay-Yo

“Sick of the games, you’re craving for a change up.” It’s the last line that Jaehyun raps before (lest the crave turn bad) Taeyong takes over briefly. For seven years now, this has been NCT 127’s musical manifesto. They changed things up so much that it’s become the new norm, that even their own seniors release songs that could reasonably be called NCT-esque. K-Pop — boygroup K-Pop, at least — has atomized since 2016. You can be the biggest boyband in the world to the worshipping fandom. Billboard 200 #1s (let alone Billboard Hot 100 #1s) don’t have to mean anything besides the buying power of the fandom — in one region. Despite that, though, the music sounds alike. Everyone is deadly serious at the things they say and perform, or deadly serious at selling how cute they are.

Of course, NCT 127 is no different at being deadly serious and deadly handsome. And “Ay-Yo” has the science down to a T: DemJointz producing, Kenzie with the topline, trap drills, piano flourishes, a meanspirited beat that sounds like the 2023 update of an arcade game fight, propulsive claps, even sirens. There’s equal amounts of singing (belting, even), rapping, and chanting. Shows must go on, things will never be the same. It’s up to you what you want to do, especially with your tomorrow. Haters lay low, cause we’re in the god realm Valhalla now. Jaehyun has no sung line, returning to rapping and occasionally hilarious spoken word moments where all he says is “Ay-yo.” But for a song that declares the need for change-ups, the song is uninterested in disrupting its own fabric. There are tiny adlibs — a well-placed woo, a brief yeah, a triumphant ha. And then there’s that chorus. From the first line on — “Just call it out — ay-yo!” “Ay-Yo” makes its intention clear: this is a time of celebration. The synth and the pads work together for a big, digitized moment of a champion walk. There’s no fighting here, though they’ll leave nothing behind, not even ashes. The show is not a fight, but a concert — maybe an assault (to the ear, to the eye) in some ways, but in many others a release of serotonin. Seven years in, NCT 127 declare their victory lap, and “Ay-Yo” sounds so grand that it invites you to celebrate your victories alongside.

The first verse also talks about a paradigm suddenly coming down to crash, from which mythical beings come out of it, gods and humans mingling in the same place. The place in question are the many closed spaces in which NCT 127 roam around in the video: a corridor from which Yuta levitates by meditating, Johnny who flies by walking. Taeyong has his hair gelled up as if he’s come out of either Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy, while Doyoung lies on a tunnel as a pitch-perfect seducer variant of Matrix’s Neo and Jaehyun, in ridiculous square sunglasses, recalls the alien-hunting Men in Black. That warehouse from which they’ve declared their world dominance; the god games they’ve played in Simon Says that required unmasking; the trippy fantasy world of racing in 2 Baddies — all of it culminates in the Ay-Yo music video without bludgeoning the fan with needless references. This is Valhalla. If you hate it, lay low. Or try shouting out Ay-yo.

Continued on part two:

On Monday, you’re celebrating the release of your latest EP with your fellow coworkers, on Wednesday, people dig up your less-than-perfect past, and on Sunday, you decide you have to leave the group. Wonho was met with allegations on consuming marijuana and owing money, and instead of letting the group shoulder that — plenty male idols do with much worse events — Wonho voluntarily left Monsta X. After that, news on Wonho came in drips: being cleared of allegations and a tell-all with Dispatch; re-signing with a subsidiary of Starship Entertainment, Highline, which was for DJs and producers; profile shoots; and then, August 2020, came Losing You. A release that heralded Wonho not as a DJ, but as soloist.

On text and with this context in mind, Losing You sounds like emotional manipulation. The opening shot of the music video is Wonho hanging upside down, shirtless; imagery so on the nose it goes back to looking profound. Six seconds later, he stares into the blurry lens of a camera with tears in his eyes — complete with monochrome colors, heavy on the dark greys and black. The music: tentative piano notes, strings, a “you” in the bridge that warbles not unlike tears blurring someone’s vision. And, of course, those lyrics. In Korean, the idea of the “you” being more important than breathing is pivotal, with explicit mentions to never leave Wonho, the protagonist; in English, there’s mentions of shields, weapons, wars, armies, and sacrifices that hammers in the idea that Wonho can’t do it without his fans, that he’d rather be empty inside or lose his way than lose them. It all sounds like the self-pitying kind of apology from someone who was innocent in the first place. But the song is robust and doesn’t go for the easy way out: it takes its time and swells near the end in a satisfying resolution, turning the manipulation to something genuine. It is the song of someone grappling with the very real possibility that his dream was over. To that end, Wonho’s vocals make for a perfect match in Losing You less by technicality and more by the emotion conveyed and the imperfect way in which he hits the notes. That Losing You was first released in English is a self-aware move on his part — Wonho was always more popular internationally than domestically, much like Monsta X. I’m uncertain if he wrote the military metaphors in the English version, but the Korean I do trust comes from him only, as well as the conceit that is sung in English: losing me is better than losing you.

A month later, Wonho debuts with lead single Open Mind. It’s about sex. No, actually that’s not true — it’s the foreplay of the foreplay, about meeting eyes in a sexual way. It’s about Wonho being different from other men, and the woman across him being different than “the other girls” (a lyric that remains both in English and Korean). She doesn’t have to love him, but for the night, “keep an o-pen mind, girl”, because he could give her a new world. In the music video, a high-end car revs its engine, bound in chains. In the face of Wonho — dressed in a suggestive red — the chains break, and he rides the car into a futuristic tunnel. (Once again: imagery so on the nose it snaps back to profound.) Wonho isn’t singing to fans here. He’s a sexual being, with the need to express — and, ideally, act on — his sexual desires. The icy synths and bass-heavy sound suits Wonho well, who is a rigid singer and dancer. He sounds confident, though, and oozes charisma whenever he crosses eyes with the camera… from the same guy that cried on-screen a month prior. The duality of both the sex and the vulnerability — the devotion, the pure love — is what makes Wonho a pitch-perfect idol, a fantasy of a man. But this isn’t so much about being a pitch-perfect idol so much as Wonho — who has writing, producing, and composing credits on all his songs — constantly oscillates between these two modes. It’s as if you can’t have fans and have sex simultaneously, or can’t have sex if you love your fans, that doing one means cheating the other. The tunnel isn’t a real one; the car doesn’t break chains. Wonho is actually the car, bound in chains, constantly revving. He’s letting us know he’s different, that he seeks out a different experience outside of the idol life — but he can’t break them. Because the chains are Wonho, too: Losing me is better than losing you. On surface, this is the core of his discography. It is an immensely interesting one.

When an idol that is a part of a group is popular enough to get a full-fledged solo release — or maybe so close to the end of their contract that it’s a last wish — the idea is that they are no longer a cog in the (group) machine, but their own person. They may not write their own songs, but the most remarkable solo artists will make it clear that this is their color, distinct from the group’s. Taeyeon, the main vocalist and leader of the massively popular Girls’ Generation, mentioned that it felt very much like her career “started” with her solo venture — a whopping eight years after her actual debut. Though that is an extreme example — she famously dislikes Girls’ Generation’s bubblegum pop lane — , the idea of the person, the artist, standing in the spotlight persists. If the idol’s life in a group is marked by their awareness of the fan, which doesn’t just reflect in their behavior off-stage but also the very songs they get on releases, then the solo artist is free of this burden. They can still choose to go there, if they wish (for instance, Taemin wrote Think Of You for his fans on his third album, NEVER GONNA DANCE AGAIN). But just as many do not. Taemin, as a solo artist, sounds and moves like a human possessed by a demon, desperately trying to shake free from it in the middle of the recording; Sunmi is the femme fatale in her musical territory; Taeyeon proves herself a true chameleon; the late Jonghyun, who had already established himself as a sensitive, warm storyteller on numerous songwriting credits before, added funk and charisma to the mix; and Key builds a world unto his own in which he’s right next to comic aliens.

Wonho is different from this on some aspects; for one, it’s as though he can’t ever turn his idol sensibilities off — or refuses to. For the other, the soundscape that Wonho employs, Monsta X had already chartered in. Wonho knows what he sounds good at, which happen to be cold synths and dance beats, and we find this on Monsta X’s catalogue too: Who Do U Love, Blind, the Japanese AURA. His songwriting and composing credits aren’t too different now that he’s solo: the tropical house track From Zero from 2017’s The Code would slot in neatly with his solo works, and the somber Mirror is an early precursor to the hazy 2021 cut DEVIL and the melancholy track to fans WENEED. 2019’s No Reason has everyone sound like Wonho one way or another. One gets the sense that Wonho is an extension of Monsta X’s music, and as such, it makes sense that he’d still be an idol archetype even on the music that is reasonably meant to distinguish him from the group. But this does not detract from Wonho. In a truly hilarious move, Monsta X had to prove they were different now; Wonho had no such obligations. His musical consistency and his refusal to move beyond idolism, I believe, is why international fans still wonder if he will return to Monsta X. (A vocal minority of Korean Monsta X fans, interested in Monsta X moreso than its individual parts, are staunchly against that, and Wonho altogether.) Monsta X were the ones that had to prove that they were just fine, if not better, than the time with Wonho. All that Wonho had to do now was fill the spotlight by himself, that is to say, fulfill his artistic potential.

Enter Love Synonym #2: Right For Us. Lead single LOSE starts with lone guitars before the chorus drops in a bass that could be the cousin of Stevie Nicks’s Edge of Seventeen and the synths crash in. The song, in Korean, is about Wonho being dumped by his lover; she broke his chains, and he doesn’t regret the time they’ve spent together, but he knows just as well that she will return: “don’t wanna fight, don’t wanna play, I can’t get over you”, Wonho sneers in a falsetto, the moment you come back to me, that’s when you lose. In English, he’s the guy who doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to play, and can’t get over her. In your game of love, he sings, I know I will lose. The music video is more vague: though Wonho cuts her shots out of the reel, the movie continues irrespective of the director’s wishes. In this film, Wonho and his girlfriend are together, but she betrays him and shoots through his heart. Wonho, the machine, the man in chains breaks through (again!) but overheats. The building that was their relationship has collapsed, and rain leaks through. Something tries to break through dark plastic, and doesn’t. The song adds strings to the mix, the claps are flat and metallic, adding to the drama of Wonho’s reedy vocals. The production has muscle and doesn’t think of switching up styles — not that Wonho needs to, because there’s no rapper around, and he’s no main vocalist that needs to show off big high notes. That alone makes it different from Monsta X’s fare, who, by this time, were slaying and chilling and killing. Wonho loses, though he makes that sound like a victory. The simplicity of LOSE’s song structure and the strength of its instrumentation makes it one of the best K-Pop songs to come out in the 2020s already.

The EP continues with the sex drive: DEVIL is blurry at the edges, suggesting moments before the sex happens. You and I mix together, Wonho sighs. Ex is the devil, Ex is the devil, he says before it is swallowed up by the mix. Best Shot employs a 90s hip hop beat with a singular, looping guitar that could come straight out of Beyoncé’s Deja Vu, a song in which a very flirty-sounding Wonho wants to make his amour of the night crazy, but they have to hit him with their best shot. Romantic getaways are promised if they were to hold his hand and follow him. But, alas, the fan fodder returns not much later. It’s, in fact, the very next song: WENEED. We need each other like stars and the night sky, Wonho sings with a plea in his voice. He can’t live without fans, and they need each other, and if he’s back on the stage, will they sing his song for him? They probably will, because that is devotion, and devotion remains even if hands are not held, even if his groove is not amazing.

Blue features prominently in Wonho’s discography. The first color you see in Losing You is a strong aquamarine color on the credits and logo. The album cover is a lighter shade, a blurry but metallic shade that suggests ice or maybe the sea at dawn. Right for Us, the second EP, has the color of ink, like the means through which Wonho wrote his lover’s story with before it was inevitably erased on Lose. Or, alternatively, the shade of the darkening sky, the last minutes of the blue hour leading to one-night stands and the promise of a romantic getaway. Blue is a color with a lot of meanings ascribed to it, often contradictory ones. It is also one of Monsta X’s official colors besides a fuchsia purple and a cooler turquoise.

The first mood I hear on Blue Letter, the third EP of Wonho, is ennui. It’s on the cover too: Wonho stands on the album cover with a gaze that isn’t exactly seductive, isn’t exactly forthcoming, but something else. It’s as though he expects that the viewer expects him to be sexy, so even the hand that touches the nape of his neck feels automatic. It’s the question of: is this enough? or, in a more deflated tone, Will this do? You wouldn’t hear this ennui right away; BLUE is a chipper and bright pop song that evokes summer and the sea. The music video is an American teenage romcom come true, complete with Wonho as the quarterback, the prom king, with his own car (unbound!) But those lyrics. Can you feel the blue? Wonho asks, the same blue on which he dives and can’t get enough of, the same blue that he wants to take his lover to, because it’s all in the blue. “Everything we need, we’re already inside of it / No matter what anyone says, we do what we like, out of control,” Wonho sings breathlessly. “We are young, we are dumb, we party all night long / When you feel, feel the blue,” he exclaims with a real relief in his voice. So the blue is a state reached upon which a party is in order. Maybe the blue is like the pale blue dot we call Earth, a place simultaneously so big and so small everything is relevant whilst nothing is. Maybe the blue is both sadness and happiness, which explains the way the song sounds almost somber at times, especially in the bridge — the very bridge where Wonho goes, “We party all night long when you feel the blue.” Perhaps, all along, the invitation to sex was masking something else — the thing that is in the blue, but also is the blue, the blue that Wonho wants his lover to feel in order to do what he likes, out of control. Out of control is a phrase he goes back to a lot in his songs — a desire that blue ,as the color of freedom, represents best.

The other mood on the album is yearning. The titles to come after BLUE suggest this to a blunt degree: No Text No Calls, Come Over Tonight, 24/7, Stranger. Of course there’s sex in it — “Filling up my daydream, tasty like whipped cream” Wonho sings on Come Over Tonight, a track that is simultaneously too modern to be called pastiche and too pastiche to truly be called modern. “Can you come over tonight? Promise I’ll hold you so tight — I can’t sleep without you, I’d be nothing without you,” Wonho sings, and it’s easy to imagine him, the prom prince, standing in front of the nerd girl’s house, suit and all, knowing she won’t answer the door. No Text No Calls suggests that there’s a breakup, one that Wonho hasn’t stomached: “Thought you’d always be mine forever / Waking up in bed alone,” On the off, he sounds like he’s fainting: “oh, it’s harder than I ever expected.” Whether this you is a lover or the fan is hard to say this time around. For the first time in his discography, one gets the sense that it doesn’t really matter. Under the scorching summer heat and the sunny synths that course under his songs, Wonho feels blue. It turns out you can’t be inside of the color, nor expect anyone else to be there with you — and neither fan nor the sex can change that color in the end. “Sometimes I feel like a stranger,” Wonho confesses with a single acoustic guitar on Stranger, “In this crazy place without you / Me, who lost his way, I’m alone.” It’s a surprisingly blunt admission from an artist that debuted in the middle of the pandemic, and cuts right at the seemingly disparate threads of devotion and sex — Wonho feels he has neither, and the need to have at least one of them permeates through his discography, both singles and B-sides: the need to connect, to touch, to know someone else is there for him. Of course, the song to follow right after Stranger is the English version of BLUE, on which the first line is: “I’m drowning down in the blue, it feels amazing.” Is admitting it enough? Will this do — faking like it isn’t happening, trying to share the pain?

If you can’t beat the sadness, then reject it; if you can’t reject it, then turn cold. The propulsive, trancelike Eye On You is the only Wonho music video to feature snow and a forest in winter, and there’s a direct link between Wonho and wolves, animals that travel in packs. In this case, though, the wolf is for sex drive… of course: I got my eye on you, he states, sounding halfway there between man and machine and uninterested about the distinction. Or so you’d think, but the chorus follows it with: I need your love, I need your touch. The eye contact that he had already alluded to in Open Mind is not inviting anymore. It’s exhausted, and at this point, one can no longer rakishly make advances about being “different”. Somebody, the B-side of the single Obsession, is even more direct: when it’s dark, anyone will do. It’s the continuation of Blue Letter, but this time, Wonho feels pressure: he’s running out of time, and time is what he needs to return to where he belongs (not the blue this time around — Obsession’s cover is black with a rich purple standing in for the galaxy, stars and the night sky). He will run away from it all if only he could have someone besides him that he could connect to. I’m all alone in a world full of strangers, Wonho says buried in the mix, blank faces staring, I’m patiently waiting… for the someone, while running away. This is the crux of the problem: a need to move, because the right answer, waiting — patience — leads to worse blues. Wonho finds refuge in the club and with the guitar, if CRAZY (I wanna make you crazy, go crazy, never let it stop, I feel it in the bounce, we’re going crazy goes the hook) is to be believed. Close plays out like a romantic movie again, which makes me think it isn’t happening: Wonho’s friends are wasted, but him, the sober guy, could go insane — until The Girl comes along, and she could be the promise for more. “Never need another heartbreak, I don’t wanna be all by myself,” Wonho sings with a relief in his voice, tentatively hopeful that things can turn out okay again.

They don’t, in this musical universe. Wonho has run out of time. He couldn’t break the chains, could not let loose (after all, he’s not crazy, he’s going crazy, implying a process), and now has to steel himself for the fact that it’s over: Don’t Hesitate, a one-off single, says everything from the title alone — here, too: ain’t got no time, babe, what if we run away. In the music video, Wonho enters a fantasy world by touching a painting in the museum. Though he lets go and suffers hard headaches, he dons a mask and destroys a car, the very symbol that once stood for his sex drive. The present is so much more precious now that there’s no other place to go to, now that there’s no time. Don’t Regret ends the relationship for good: though she is gone from his life, he’s not sad about it: "Even if time passes, I’m still the same, I don’t regret it for even one moment,” goes the main conceit of the chorus. The fan and the lover have become the same: he will no longer sing for her, no longer hold her hand, but he also loves her, he wants to be more than just friends, and hold her tight. In the music video and one of its most striking scenes, Wonho is in a warehouse, surrounded by men clad in black. One of them catches his attention: something about his gait, his hands. It’s himself, staring back at him. Finally, his yearning has caught up with him, the core of his discography, which was really just a void that he desperately sought to fill, has been filled. All along, it was patience that led him to the answers he sought for. On & On, the B-side that bookends Don’t Regret, finally allows his emotions to pour out with the coldest beats in his discography: I can no longer hide, oh I / All my emotions, my emotions, Wonho sings with the airy distance of someone whose body has already been taken over by the emotions, which leads him to dance on and on with his lover, all night. This time, she’s the only one that’s different: your own different vibe, Yunhway, the female counterpart of the song, is equally breathless in this song. Anything you want, I can give it to you, for you, I’ll give all of it, even if you don’t say it, I can feel it, she raps in quick speed. She will always be by his side, even when everyone else is gone, his for life. The choreography MV of this is shot on what looks like a helicopter landing spot — eerily similar to the place that catapulted Monsta X to attention, all those years ago, with Hero. Dawn had broken out on Hero’s music video. Late at night, one gets the sense that On & On marks the end of one long day for Wonho.

By and large, Wonho’s musical palette is clean pop by a singer who plays to his strengths to great effect. Being on his own on stage — though as painful as it sounds like it was for him, having debuted in the middle of the pandemic at all — made his star that already shone through on Monsta X efforts glow that much brighter. His clear-eyed vision on his music shines through from Losing You to On & On. But while other soloists in the K-Pop sphere come out of the box seemingly fully formed, thus far, Wonho’s trajectory has felt, and sounded like, a gestation (that is, sonically, full of great ideas). By the end, he’s chosen to go to the military enlistment with something totally different for him: an unperfect brush with pop rock on Don’t Regret, which feels like the kind of growing pains one would experience whilst trying to find themselves. But the devotion feels uniform by this point, and as such, the car can finally be unleashed — driving into a sweaty, slinky future. I can hardly wait for his return next year. Of course, the date Wonho chose to end his enlistment on falls pretty much exactly on the four-year anniversary of his debut single Losing You. He’s a Pisces, you have to let him have his sentimental moments. Now that he knows he won’t have to end his dream by Sunday, the rest is smooth sailing from here. What follows? That’s all in the blue.

This is the final part of the Monsta X Potpourri. To start from the beginning, go here. Last week covered 2018-2019, you can find it here. Yesterday, I covered the time from the pandemic to now.

Monsta X all released songs solo, but the rappers went for "mixtapes" and of the singers, only Kihyun and Wonho have full fledged discographies. Let's go through each of these tracks briefly.

On that note: I did not like anything I.M released solo, so I picked some one-off single where he was featured.

Shownu: I'll Be There

Shownu has one of my favorite vocal tones of the group, and he's improved tremendously throughout Monsta X's run. There's so much drama he inflicts upon the average Monsta X line he receives; if Kihyun is fire, Shownu is the one that burns in the melody. But there's control in it, too. That is what makes the ballad for this above-average K-drama (a rock ballad that sounds like a Eurovision Song Contest entry!) so engaging to listen to, too. He’d make a fantastic soloist no matter what musical path he took. Shownu is slated to return to Monsta X this year; we’ll see if he will go there.

Kihyun: , (Comma)

There are cases where the main vocal of the group turns around and decides they want to do ballads now. So to Kihyun's credit, he has stuck to his guns and remained… pop rock! His solo discography has been quite fun to witness thus far and I'm interested in what he will explore later down the line. Comma, from his first EP, is a good rock song with quite the pace, like a calmer take on Kim Jaejoong's Just Another Girl.

Jooheon: Runway feat. Killagramz

You have to be really, really good for me to check you out as a Korean rapper. Jooheon... is... not going there! But that's fine, because he has the RuPaul runway-esque track in his first mixtape, Runway, on which Jooheon sounds as assertive and strong as ever, and the beat agrees at points. Jooheon is quite the variety star now. I feel like he's on everything involving idols now, and he does all the bits people find funny... good for him.

Jooheon feat. IM: Flower Cafe

You have to be really, really good for me to check you out as a Korean rapper. I.M, who already sounded like he phoned in his raps at some point on Monsta X tracks, not only doesn't go there, but does hazy trap music that makes me seek out the next wall to hit my head against. So here is Flower Cafe, a song which, I was told, at the time outstreamed everything Monsta X released up until that point when it first came out. It's an agreeable coffeeshop hip hop track with spirited performances.

Minhyuk feat. Jooheon: Ongshimi

Outside of Monsta X, Minhyuk is mostly a model and a radio show host. He doesn't do anything with music, which makes sense to me. But Ongshimi, a solo performance Minhyuk did for a concert, whacked me the first time I came across it, and it's not even on Spotify. A full-blown EDM trot track, and Minhyuk - usually frail and thin on most Monsta X tracks - fills the song with ease. The fact that he still sounds like he's doing poor karaoke on somebody else's performance sells it that much more. Jooheon assists on this by helpfully adding, oooooongshimi shimi, oooooongshimi. Okay! Let's go.

Hyungwon: Picture

If Minhyuk's oooooong-shimi-shimi was befuddling, then consider Hyungwon. A solid dancer in performances, to me, Hyungwon sounds a little like if the frog prince turned back to a human being but still retained a little bit of frog accent. That adds to his vocal's strange charm, almost as if somebody with a tone like this shouldn't sing as well as he does. Fortunately, though, Hyungwon also seems to know that his vocals aren't technically fantastic enough for adult contemporary or anything of the sort, so both his solo outings go for electropop. Picture is for some web drama he's starred in and is a fun pop song that utilizes the atmospheric guitars in a solid way. Hyungwon's command is strong; he has all the potential for a solo if he wants to.

Short rundown

Give me one song that I should listen to from the whole batch

Who Do U Love? in English; Beautiful Liar in Korean; Livin It Up in Japanese.

One.

Who Do U Love. Come on now.

Not a single.

Lost in the Dream. Or like something that is really so Monsta X you’d get almost the whole history? Stuck, obviously.

What’s the Monsta X song you listened to most often?

Shoot Out. Normally my last.fm profile and my Spotify stats will tell two different stories, but this time they’re consistent.

Give me one album/EP I should listen to from the whole batch

Fatal Love for the album, Follow - Find You or Reason for the EP.

I want to start listening to their discography too. Where should I start?

First, I'd listen to Trespass, Hero, All In, and Stuck. After that, everything from Guilty on you can enjoy top to bottom. I'd pass on most of the Japanese releases, but do give Livin It Up a shot.

You don't have to listen to the solos... okay, except Minhyuk's, that one is great, but if you liked the descriptions enough, y’know, it’s there and enjoyable. (I do recommend Wonho’s stuff, though, for certain.)

Would you recommend their discography?

If you're already into K-Pop, sure. If not, probably not, as Monsta X is not the best entry point to the genre; then again, a lot of people did get into K-Pop through them, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Closing remarks

I skipped the Universe songs, because I don’t want to talk about Universe, and the songs are not interesting. But, for completion’s sake: “If With U” and “Kiss Or Death” are two songs that exist.

This goes into unserious territory a bit, but the rap delivery of Love Killa reminds me so much, like to a hilarious degree, of the flow that this parody group did once, Big Byung? Stress Come On. I don’t think a single idol involved in that video is is still doing K-Pop stuff. When I tell you I’ve been in this for so long… Also why go with a swish at the end of the bar?

My star Unknown Existence— Monsta X is so funny. Lore that just keeps on going, at some point it's one word that is the hook no matter how tight the bar, the slow uphill climb of Hyungwon and Minhyuk receiving lines, but always Kihyun at the chorus in a way you just don’t come across in K-Pop anymore. Hello, I'm an alli-alli-gator. Boob vibrations... car crash narrative leading to lore... "slay", my two things fighting like Monica and Brand, follo-lo-low, follow-lo-low. I laughed a lot while going through their discography.

I didn't believe it when people said Monsta X do a variety of genres in their discography. Honestly, I'm still a little dubious on it. I hear three strains of music primarily: the Stucks, the rave tracks like Fallin, and the pile of tracks "for the fans". Sometimes, rock appears in their sound, but it seems to me that this is reserved for their titles for the most part. Interestingly enough, R&B appeared at the start of their discography, then fizzled out, and played a bigger and important role in their discography later; usually K-Pop groups will feature R&B heavily in their B-side discography and consistently so.

Sometimes there’s rappers that only rap because they can’t sing. I.M has chops and interest, but there’s this very noticeable section at some point (I’ll say 2018 to 2020?) where he sounds utterly bored with what he does. Jooheon doesn’t have that, but that in turn makes it that everything Jooheon does is a baseline “okay” wherein he genuinely has to go above and beyond for me to think it’s good. (Kihyun has the same problem as a vocal.)

When I went through the solos, I noticed Kihyun has a lot of OSTs, and a lot of those aren’t even ballads but like, two steps away from being fully Monsta X. There’s one track for a show called Police Station next to Fire Station, and it’s like so Monsta X. There’s another that Kihyun and Jooheon have called Can’t Breathe, which has these annoying synths that still sound Monsta X. Consistency — it haunts you everywhere!

My last Potpourri was with Nine Inch Nails, and it was easy to consider and compare Nine Inch Nails only to themselves, without thinking about impact and bands that sounded like them. Maybe that was my fault or my inexperience; but for Monsta X, it's practically impossible to talk about them without the overarching context. They're not trailblazers like BTS and NCT 127 are, which means I have to bring up other groups to show where Monsta X's position was (lest we forget that Monsta X's sound was nothing new from the get-go!) I consider them a group that refined the boygroup sound and passed it onto other groups, and that's not the worst thing to be. They always remained hopelessly Monsta X, and I think that solidifies their impact. There's groups that did not do that, that accepted every trend and every whim and sounded like different people every single new release, and they will surely be lost to time.

I don't know if it came across, but on the NIN Potpourri(s), I read interviews Trent Reznor gave, reviews, analyses, all that just to sound informed on the subject I was talking about. For Monsta X, the few times where I did dip my feet into their thoughts, I realized that I could just plain ignore it and move on with my day. (See: the Fantasia comment) K-pop idols don't often have interesting things to say about music. It also occurs just as regularly that the idols plain dislike the exciting sounds the group brings out. I watched a bit of "Monsta X rank their own songs" in some kind of March Madness tournament bracket; I wasn't surprised to hear that Minhyuk liked Misbehave the most... an R&B track that is only semi-interesting because it’s the third best song off ALL ABOUT LUV. (They also couldn't tell apart X from 2017's The Code to the chorus "X, X" of 2020's Guess Who.) (Fatal Love won, on that note.)

Those of you that don't know K-Pop, I hope that the amount of terms didn't utterly confuse you. Those of you that do know K-Pop but haven't enjoyed Monsta X as much, I still hope you can enjoy one song at least? I wouldn't call myself a stan, but I did have a good time with the discography. I believe you will, too.

Questions / love confessions / etc

Tip jar

And then came the pandemic.

One day, hundreds, if not thousands of fans chant during your performances, keep company with you during prerecording of music shows, shout I love you at all times, laugh at everything you do in signing events - and the next, it's gone. The pandemic brought a disorienting effect to idols, many of whom said it was odd to only stare at a camera, as if it was just a rehearsal. It also paused the musical trends for a bit. There was always louder - NCT 127 brought the metal riff out for their 2020 smash Kick It - but between the time period of 2020 and the end of 2022, I can only think of three trends overall: the Blinding Lights clones, the Say So-indebted disco trend, and pop rock, on one hand from Olivia Rodrigo's good 4 u, on the other hand from G-IDLE's triumphant return with Tomboy. Monsta X... kind of went there? In 2020, they were five years in the game, and sort of in the phase where no matter what they did, loyal fans would still be there. That can lead to two options: either you succumb to autopilot and tour extensively to make up for the financial loss of releasing an album... or you become confident enough to attempt risks. Girl group Twice, in their fourth year, utterly reinvented themselves musically; A Pink did the same in their sixth. For Monsta X, the six-member configuration proved new possibilities... and a new, more mature sound palette to come, especially with the titles.

But first, the English album.

ALL ABOUT LUV

All About Luv arrived Valentine's Day, 2020. As you'll recall, Who Do U Love? was the lead single of this album and came out June 14, 2019. Just like the rollout for X-PHENOMENON, the rollout of the English album went for an ungodly amount of time. But according to Eshy Gazit – Monsta X’s American manager – in the 2021 documentary The Dreaming, the singles received airplay, so this was all great. Fact is that trying to release a Japanese album, an English album, and releasing for your home market all at once meant that at some point, something had to cede. And it wasn’t going to be the Korean releases, now were they?

The single rollout feels a little befuddling to me, too. LOVE U came second and is amusing because the chorus lyrics actually go, “I really want to love you / I can’t say the word I want to / Cause they won’t play it on the radio” – which brings to mind Enrique Iglesias’s misguided turn of Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You) in 2010, a song best enjoyed in its radio edit rather than its original “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude / But tonight I’m fucking you.” The third single, Someone’s Someone, was a grower for me, an autotuned-led chorus and mostly that murky synth that recalls late-2010s American pop that I was never hot about. MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, the fourth single, arrived sometime December 2019 and still featured Wonho's featherlight vocals (one line). His shots - I'm sure he had some - were left out. The best song of the album, the bass guides the song forward, the percussion are lively, and the vocal performance is suitably elated at the idea of a romantic getaway. But none of the songs are very Monsta X, and besides MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, they're also not very good.

In general, ALL ABOUT LUV is funny because mostly the songs are either about sex or a breakup. The sex slate, we’ve covered. The breakup slate contains synth-adult contemporary song HAPPY WITHOUT ME, one of two songs that sounds like anything from Monsta X’s Korean discography, the other being SHE’S THE ONE with its cascading synths. From the slower side of ALL ABOUT LUV, the best track is MISBEHAVE, an adult contemporary song that kind of veers into Christmas carol in the melody about… two people with issues. “They say we got issues, but girl, that’s why I’m with you.” And “Everytime we argue, straight into the bedroom.” Wow, even when this is about fighting, it’s about sex! Minhyuk and Shownu sound great on it though. Rounding out the ALL ABOUT LUV album is BESIDE U featuring Pitbull, who sounds on autopilot just like all of Monsta X. The rollout finished in April with one of the best tracks of the record, YOU CAN’T HOLD MY HEART, a semi-rock-ish pop song that I Imagine Dragons would’ve topped the charts with in 2015. Things really are all about timing. With how Tiktok’s algorithm picks midtempo songs like these with a guitar underneath and makes them go viral, don’t be surprised if this gets a second wind.

That being said, there is a song on this album that would’ve enjoyed reasonable chart success had they invited a Latino rapper onto the remix: GOT MY NUMBER, a solid reggaeton-tinged pop with a very sticky hook about how Monsta X is better than the other guy (so the bright version of Who Do U Love?).

The album ranked #5 on the Billboard 200 (the album chart), which is a solid result, but I can’t imagine anyone pick it up for musical merit alone. The album feels stale musically, which also results in a befuddling singles rollout. You could make the argument that K-Pop, in general, is dated in musical ideas, but the best of the genre bursts in color, and the high-energy aspect of it is what draws people to fandoms in the first place. And, this is also important, classic songwriting is employed: you can always tell a verse from a chorus, a pre-chorus from a bridge, etc. (It’s also why EDM sounded fantastic in K-Pop.) In 2020, such distinctions seemed increasingly useless - choruses were indistinguishable from verses, tracks ended without a bridge, all of it lost to a general “#mood”. Monsta X can’t help but be K-Pop, which is fine. But K-Pop will always feel quaint next to the quickly eroding definition of pop in the US. In either case, while this was (still) rolling out, Monsta X geared up with their first collection of songs as a six-member piece.

FANTASIA X

You’ll be shocked to know that Fantasia X is a compound of Fantasia and Monsta X. As Minhyuk puts it, Fantasia is the most beautiful and brilliant part of your life, and the X (not unknown existence!) refers to Monsta X capturing this beautiful and brilliant part of themselves. The press release in Korean talks about a blockbuster scale of Monsta X’s world, which means that the rollout and the MV both feature clock motifs. To that end, the rollout of this EP gave six trailers, all (ostensibly) titled after tracks of the album: “ZONE,” “GASOLINE”, “CHAOTIC”, “IT AIN’T OVER”, “BEAUTIFUL NIGHT”, and “FLOW”. All six videos are shot in a stylish black and white. While they present similar motifs – phones, telephone booths, keys, disappearances, frozen time – only the last one offers a hint of a narrative, because Kihyun’s key (in the fifth, Beautiful Night) is one that winds up a music box that plays the melody in reverse… until someone comes in. It’s Minhyuk, we find out in the last clip, and with the correct clock, all of time is reversed. Imagine living in this story world, though. You escaped the worst day of your life and have to do it all again because somebody indulges in experiments. Not just once, multiple times. And why is Minhyuk doing it anyway? Does he have dead parents too?

FANTASIA sounds like Follow from the get go, but swaps the zurna for metallic, thin synths. The mostly gold color palette of the music video already suggests that this is less the extreme color and sound palette as Follow’s burst of orange and blue, and you can clearly hear Wonho in both Hyungwon and Minhyuk’s lines in the chorus. Also, this is the first, and not the last, time that Jooheon says “slay” somewhere in the rap (lmao). It’s hard to say something that’s distinctive about Fantasia musically or in terms of their discography, but it’s just as hard not to think of this record as a necessary release to quickly establish the group as six. Shownu is very sexy in the music video though. Also, this would be the last time Monsta X went for lore.

The EP Fantasia X, similarly, doesn’t want to attempt the heights reached in Follow – Find You, and is largely fine. ZONE takes liberal inspiration from 2018’s Fallin’ with its EDM beatdrop, while highlight Beautiful Night employs tropical pulses and synth arpeggios to great effect. The other ones also take inspiration from other songs – FLOW is like a take on Chainsmokers’ Something Just Like This, while Chaotic sounds like a Monsta X B-side of the Destroyer kind (minus rock, though). IT AIN’T OVER rhymes “it ain’t over / til it’s over” to nauseating effect, a rhyme that is miraculously worse than any fire / higher rhymes. Stand Up, the closer, has all of Monsta X chant together in the beginning in a way that reminds me a lot of Big Bang’s Sunset Glow, but its centerpiece is more modern: a mostly tropical pop chorus that sounds like it should’ve been on a FIFA 2020 compilation. GASOLINE, the dark, reggaeton-esque beat that played in Shownu’s clip, is not on the album. Ahead of the release of Fantasia X, Monsta X said that Fantasia was a title track candidate and eventually won over another song. Based on what Kihyun says regarding Fantasia, I believe that song would eventually become the next lead single, and the fantastic GASOLINE became a B-side to the release that followed.

Fatal Love

Competition programs aren’t new in the K-Pop world – Monsta X came out of one. But what television label Mnet did with Produce 101 was still different: the idea was that the viewer, “the national producer”, would “decide” the eleven members, trainees of various entertainment labels, and make them debut – and the group would exist for a temporary time. This started in 2015, and continued to disrupt the status quo all the way until 2020, when investigations concluded that Mnet rigged the results in their favor. As such, the 2019 formed X1 disbanded as soon as they debuted, and the first year of the pandemic was also the first where Mnet did not debut a new group. Instead, the channel revived a format that had previously made (and broke) established girlgroups with Queendom and made one for boygroups. In fact, they made a two-part bit out of it: Road to Kingdom, aired 2020, re-introduced The Boyz, who debuted 2017, to a broader public. Following that win, they released the sleek CHASE EP, where the rollout began with parts of members’ faces – lips, eyes, jawline – as “The Stealers” of the town that needed to be found. Elsewhere, NCT 127 delivered back-to-back knockouts with Neo Zone and its repackage The Final Round. Fantasia’s MV, the golden set at least, already reminds me of Kick It’s MV, but I see both the plastic foliage of Neo Zone’s album cover and CHASE’s member closeups in third album’s Fatal Love’s initial announcement – but far from me calling it a poor copy, it in fact makes Love Killa quite modern. Monsta X was always part of the conversation – Ateez sounds like them, for instance – but for the first time, Monsta X chose to engage with the conversation around them, too. And they were ready to… slay, chill, and kill. According to Love Killa’s main hook, anyway.

Love Killa finally marries the big budget Monsta X have for their music videos with the song quality. 2017’s Dramarama sounds like the closest musical touchpoint of Love Killa, what with the bass being the main conceit. But where Dramarama sounded a bit playful in the verses at times, Love Killa is pure sleek, except the chorus section that feels much more… Monsta X (Kihyun singing – right, but it’s a catchy bit!). There’s a bit of a warbly, high-pitched synth in the pre-chorus and chorus section that adds the song its necessary spice before the impeccable cool returns. “You to look into my eyes, straight into my eyes, and just say: I want you, eat me like a main dish” goes I.M in the second verse, and it’s easily the most sexually explicit I’ve heard a Korean pop song go in its English part. (Yay to oral sex?) What I find so interesting about this song in particular is the commentary Minhyuk gave it when Monsta X reacted to their own MV: “The song is good because it’s at a comfortable key.” Kihyun objects, saying it's much too low. It’s a very illuminating thing to say and it’s the very thing that makes Love Killa stand apart from all the other Monsta X titles thus far. It’s just the reinvention they needed from Follow in particular, where Kihyun went very high in the pre-chorus.

The music video uses a classic K-Pop trope – the members cosplay as various protagonists of various well-known classics. Don’t ask anyone what Shownu’s was – I have heard both John Wick and Hitman, but fact is he simply wears a suit and looks stunning. Jooheon as Heath Ledger’s Joker and I.M as Taxi Driver visually represent the way we heard them again and again: a bit crazy and very fiery for Jooheon, and total cool for I.M. Kihyun is locked up yet again (this time as Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of Lambs fame). Hyungwon and Minhyuk have the best sets: Hyungwon makes a very stylish Tyler Durden, and Minhyuk makes a perfect fit for Patrick Bateman. Drop the morning routine, king!

The rest of Fatal Love makes for a tight, largely satisfying affair – for the first time, the loud songs have a strongly threatening aura to them (the very good Guess Who and Thriller make two great examples of this). Gasoline places right after Love Killa and is every bit as good as the teaser suggested. Hyungwon makes his debut as writer, composer, and arranger of the moody and nocturnal Nobody Else, while Korean-American soloist Eric Nam lends his writing skills (and some background vocals) on the aggressive BEASTMODE. Stand Together uses traditional instrumentation for yet another song that sounds like a threat, and then the aggression abruptly ends for the closing section. Sorry I’m Not Sorry, the closer, is acoustic-led and sounds quite American in production and structure. Last Carnival twinkles in the back, a more mature take on some of the “cute” B-sides Monsta X has had in their career. My personal favorite of the album, though, is Night View. Following a perfectly fitting, airy vocal performance from all members (I.M shines here quite a bit!) the synths surge forward in the mostly instrumental chorus, where only one question is asked: “Shall we dance on the moonlight?” For three minutes, Monsta X make that sound less like a grammatical mistake, and more like a thing that could actually happen. Don’t expect a synthpop masterpiece of the levels of Just Hold On, We’re Going Home, because this still takes notes from conventional K-Pop songwriting tropes. That being said, this song couldn’t have placed in earlier points of Monsta X’s discography. They sound older and more nuanced, willing to succumb to the mood rather than coast by on the production. Fatal Love rank among the best of Monsta X’s discography. Maybe the PR team should’ve saved the “blockbuster scale” bit for this record?

Flavors of Love

Unlike the Korean discography, the Japanese discography doesn't boast a total 180 - if a degree was picked, it’s like 360. Third Japanese full-length Flavors of Love is the strongest Japanese album just by the strength of a solid album tracklisting - noisy songs in the front, quiet stuff in the back - but is obviously not at the quality of Fatal Love. WANTED, the single with which the album was announced, completes the trilogy of Monsta X delving into Turkish sounds for title tracks, this time going for 2000s Turkish Pop. But it wasn't the lead single to the album, that was instant snoozer for-the-fans midtempo track Wish on the Same Sky. The Korean tracks that made it in Japanese are Follow, Fantasia, and Love Killa. The rest of the album is solid, if nothing to write home about. I like RE:VERSEDAY and DIAMOND HEART, the former of the Stuck category for the umpteenth time, and the latter a propulsive track that halts all beat for a dramatic string section and Kihyun crooning Shine on your diamond heart.

One of a Kind

One of a Kind marks the first of a trilogy – no, not like that – in which Jooheon would produce the title tracks. If Love Killa didn't convince you of Monsta X's reinvention, lead single Gambler most definitely will. The song starts with snaps and Jooheon saying with a deadpan voice, If you don't know, now you know. Okay? Deal. Then an ominous bass comes in, followed with some of the best Minhyuk and Hyungwon vocals on a title track at this point, all syrupy and slow. The guitars kick in for the pre-chorus before adding another pre-chorus part with Shownu that briefly pulls back only to amp the tension with a very cleverly used Kihyun verse before the chorus takes off — mostly instrumental, dark horns first before the one-liner My suit is black, my suit is fresh, open my pack let me show how I bang breaks the tension. It’s so cool. Jooheon's opening bar to his rap — me? I'm a handsome sum of money — is probably one of the best K-pop rap one liners of all time. And when the song just keeps exploding near the end like a row of fireworks with the Jooheon-Kihyun double whammy, one gets the sense that Gambler is Monsta X reimagined: the good parts are left intact, and everything else has cooled to sub-zero degrees. That pays off for Hyungwon and Minhyuk the most, but it helps not to have any shouting in the chorus on a Monsta X for a change. This is the first Monsta X song to actually have groove, and is one of my favorite title tracks of theirs overall.

The music video follows Monsta X doing a heist, which means hot people in smart suits. Monsta X stage the whole affair, including a made-up fight between Kihyun and Minhyuk in the climax, and when the bomb planted by Kihyun earlier goes off, all of Monsta X take police cars and leave the scene, with the white people present (presumably?) dead. I'm reminded of The Boyz's The Stealer, specifically their 2021 Golden Disc Awards performance - needless to say, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven was a cultural reset.

Much like their English-language discography, the rest of the album, called One Of A Kind, is mostly concerned with sex. In a true K-Pop EP move, the blockbuster Gambler is followed up with a much calmer track: highlight and bossa nova-influenced Heaven. It’s followed with Addicted, which sounds like a late-20s revisit of earlier Monsta X "loud" B-sides. Secrets is a straightforward K-Pop bside, benign pop and in all-English, featuring the line "They're playing Whitney from the 90s, yeah" (I'm guessing My Love Is Your Love? or maybe I'm Your Baby Tonight?) and would later appear on the second English full-length album The Dreaming. BEBE does similar things in Korean. The most interesting track on here is Rotate, with its bouncy bass as a main conceit and bursts in color as soon as Kihyun croons "Yeaaaaaaaaaa" featuring members helpfully adding "you like to make dirty," And when Kihyun goes "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," the answer is "all day, all night". Then I.M raps the line "Switchin' positions, I like to rotate" I think I.M wants to let his fans know he enjoys having sex! Shownu and Minhyuk deliver two very strong performances too, but this is Kihyun's all the way. The release is closed with a Korean version of LIVIN' IT UP. I don't think One of a Kind ranks among my favorite Monsta X releases, and as a follow-up to Fatal Love feels a bit too safe musically and artistically, but it's hard to deny that it's solid across the board.

No Limit

The car pulls up - yes, that's one of the cars that left at the end of the Gambler music video - to a desert. (Shownu is missing because he had to serve in the military.) I.M lazes around with a cowboy hat on him, and on cue, a Western-esque whistle appears out of nowhere. What follows is what I can only describe as the Jooheon-and-Kihyun show, a lot of shouting from those two, featuring three others. As a result, this is a Monsta X title I aggressively do not care about. DOA like Rush? Probably not, though Rush and Trespass are definitive inspiration points to this song. A re-tread from everything Gambler set itself out to do? Absolutely. Welcome to No Limit, this is lead single Rush Hour, a song that traps Monsta X in a hell of their own making - and part two of the "Jooheon produced the title" trilogy. On that note, I hate that "dash, wiro dash" part so much. So much.

No Limit arrived late 2021, and, like many Monsta X releases where I don't enjoy the title, the B-sides provide much better. Autobahn is sleek and utter electronics, coupling empty drums and with a muscular bass and highly processed vocal turns, if not outright zero-setting autotune. It's the most muted of Monsta X's rave attempts, but possibly also the most accessible for fans. Ride With U continues the theme of driving tunes, but is more pop; Got me in chains adds a dash of classic Monsta X songwriting on top of it. Just Love is much slower in its gear, with I.M coasting on it effortlessly; Mercy is all dubstep drama that sounds a little dated. And I got love is the for-the-fans slow track. In terms of career highlights, it probably won't rank as high as a The Connect: Dejavu (few releases do), but No Limit does at least try to reach where Fatal Love went and makes for a competent, well-produced release.

The Dreaming

I did not like the documentary The Dreaming. Released in the midst of the pandemic, it is letter to fans, online concert, and behind-the-scenes content fans normally get for free all at once, and all of it is awkward. (And no Shownu!?) The corresponding album, much like ALL ABOUT LUV, is a collection of solid, catchy pop songs that doesn't sound of its time at all. The ones that are, like the synth-drenched Whispers in the Dark, still sound like they're six years too late. Like with ALL ABOUT LUV, the songs are still very almost-there in the sexual innuendos. Here's one from the poppy You Problem (which sounds like the bicycle ride track from Wii Sports Resort): "All these chills, all these thrills, burn my billion dollar bills / Got us lying naked on the floor, Like you've never seen before" - okay! Sure!

It's interesting where K-Pop ended up with its foray into the United States. BTS managed to cross over by singing straight from the demo lyrics, but even then, it was moreso the strength of the fandom and less radioplay. I don't want to say BTS arrived to #1 on the Hot 100 "without legitimate impact" or whatever - that would be xenophobic on the one hand, and misunderstanding the situation on the other. K-Pop made collecting and buying its main draw. That is what you're told to do as a fan - buy, buy, buy. Like the idol? Buy the album. Like this selfie of your favorite idol? Buy the album. They're working so hard for you - what can you do? Buy their records. I can't even fault BTS fans for playing the game; they do not know any other. It does, however, put BTS - and, actually, all the other groups - in an odd position where it gets abundantly clear there is a not-inconsiderable niche (in the US, but worldwide too) that has enough power to let these albums chart to No. 1 but never in the Billboard Hot 100. So you have a fandom in the US, but the general public won't care for you. Some groups plain quit trying to change up their sound for an elusive spot they might not even get: NCT 127 - you recall they tipped their hat to I Like It territories with Regular - stopped doing English versions, or really any kind of mainstream attempt anywhere, and charts nicely both domestically and on the Billboard 200 regardless. (SM probably stopped that because there were threats rumors of a NCT Hollywood unit by SM, which were squelched only just recently.) On the other hand, girlgroup Twice earnestly tries challenging the Hot 100 and, at least, have songs that remotely work in the current American pop conversation (the latest two releases, Moonlight Sunrise and Set Me Free, borrow from Dua Lipa's 2020 album Future Nostalgia). In both markets, but especially the international one, Monsta X could do what NCT 127 did. But are they interested in screaming Jealousyyyyyyyy again? Doesn't seem like it. On the other hand, are they interested in topping the Billboard charts? But that would imply extensive touring. That would imply a lengthy promotional time and a lot of acrobatics on Monsta X songs. I'm talking songs under three minutes, I'm talking murky not-quite trap with not-quite singing #mood pieces, or the alternative, which is a viral TikTok dance with some funny hashtag. No Korean entertainment label is ready to go there - and frankly, why bother? You got your fans, and your fans buy it as long as their bias looks cute and the songs are semi-decent in a K-Pop context. So The Dreaming ends up in this awkward position where it's neither true fan fodder nor a genuine bid for the market. At least they sound good.

Shape of Love

In May 2022, Monsta X released another EP called Shape of Love. On the lead single Love, Hyungwon opens the song with What do you think love is? For the final piece of the "Jooheon produced that" trilogy, the answer to love is a blend of Jersey club bed squeaks, pianos, an old school hip hop beat, and a delicious saxophone solo after the chorus that Jooheon dominates. It still does relatively reliable Monsta X things, mind you, but it’s spirited and a lot of fun. The song didn't grab me at first listen at all, and only revealed itself to me on the third listen or so. It's slightly pastiche and slightly modern, and as such slots in almost perfectly with 2022's music landscape. The music video is Monsta X performing, mostly, with members getting shots in various other sets that the other uses. Minhyuk looks great in the one with the white walls. The glittery shots are almost certainly inspired by NCT 127's Favorite MV. Other than that, no lore... no extra sets for the members... just vibes. Monsta X don't know what love is, and the music video is a collection of dream imagery that doesn't offer answers, either. But Kihyun shouts, "I hope this moment is forever - please make me crazy," at the end of the chorus, which is as close as an answer as anyone in this lifetime will get.

The Melon Charts are sort of the Korean Billboard Hot 100, with the added delicacy of updating every hour - very important if you're into idol groups and want to chart your favorite's success. There's also a couple other charts, most of which pull data from their streaming platform (Melon Charts with streaming platform Melon, Flo Charts with streaming platform Flo, etc.) So a Perfect All Kill, a name that music platform aggregate iChart came up with in 2009, is when a song hits #1 on all important music platforms. Monsta X didn't quite go there... but because following a steady upclimb of the domestic fandom, they nevertheless ranked #1 on five different music charts with Love. It took Monsta X seven years to get to this point... forget long time or no, this is nothing to scoff at for a boygroup. Or any group. To my knowledge, the comeback to follow after this one - Beautiful Liar, released January 2023 - did not peak at #1.

The rest of the record, Shape of Love, is thankfully not as blank as this ridiculous album cover. But just like One of a Kind, (and No Limit to some degree), it’s content with giving you middle of the road pop music. Burning Up features R3HAB and is a straightforward, sleek pop track that would slot in nicely with their American discography. Breathe utilizes a drop but instead of it being bass, this time it's bright disco synths, complete with a key change. (Also, they say take deep breath in English, and say similar in Korean... which... isn't breathe but A for effort!) Wildfire is in English, employing all drama in the verses and snapping into attention in the chorus. Minhyuk sounds incredible on it because he is clearly not as wide-reaching with his vocals as Kihyun is; his fragility adds a real depth to the song. Saranghanda, which is I Love You in Korean, is a mature re-take on the tropical pop trend, and we close the album out with AND, a midtempo track with reverbed acoustic guitars that I'm never hot about.

Much like American artists, Korean idols also sign a contract when debuting. But instead of album obligations, idols sign a seven-year contract. (That used to be thirteen years in very, very dark times over at SM Entertainment.) So a lot of K-Pop groups live in their known formation only for seven years because idols decide they want to do their own thing, try out acting, or maybe the label drops them because the group isn't a financial asset they're interested in carrying around. Five of six members of Monsta X chose to renew - with the sixth, I.M, to part ways with Starship Entertainment but still be around as a Monsta X member. Honestly one of the best-case scenarios of the group.

REASON

It's so strange to talk about a release I just covered. But here we are, January 2023. REASON arrived with all five members present. I had this to say of the release back then: "Reason ends the trilogy of Jooheon-produced titles and brings Ryan Jhun to the helm title track Beautiful Liar. Thankfully, though, the song continues the rock flourishes to great success. There's no sudden switchups here; the intro that you hear at  the start continues, mainly assisted by a slick bass [...] There's a real joy to [hear] the double punch of the surging pre-chorus with these sick electric guitars and the insistent, almost urgent chorus that pulls back in the production but maintains the drama with the vocals. I.M's rap part is especially inspired and rhyming "hoo!" with "hoo!" on Jooheon's part is cooler than I could convey you through text." Hyungwon and Minhyuk sound both fantastic on it; Minhyuk with his syrupy inflections, and Minhyuk’s fantastic falsetto gliding with him. I want to highlight the music video too, which continues the big arena sets that Love started, plus adds crowds and even horses that really adds to the song's vibe of a matador waiting for the bull to strike. Just when it does, the tapestry changes. Remember when I said Monsta X wouldn't go back to mature songwriting until years down the line... with All In? Yeah, this Chevkov's Gun waited seven long years. It's a fantastic song.

This EP has everyone fully present vocally, and for the first time in a while, the melodies are not only fine, but genuinely interesting. Even with a track like Deny, ostensibly R&B, the pre-chorus and chorus elevate the track and make it sound fluffy. (Plus, those stick drums in the verses!) The tracks sound like they could be singles. LONE RANGER, a track best described as yeehaw pop, makes me wish Korean artists explored year-length promotions. Reason is a true, towering achievement. We'll see if it has legs in K-Pop and if somebody will try and copy this sound - won't take too long now. Even if nobody does, though, it goes down as one of Monsta X’s best releases regardless.

The next (and truly final) time we cover Monsta X, I briefly talk about what each member did individually as musicians, and, as a finish, I have some personal thoughts to bring up. Also, you know, a tl;dr, cause we’re heading to part four. Wonho gets his own post.

This is part two of the Potpourri series dedicated to Monsta X. For Part One, click here.

Between Monsta X receiving their first win and until the next time they'd come back in March 2018 with The Connect: Dejavu, one world-shattering event happened, one that fans call "paving the way": BTS made the United States a viable market for K-Pop.

Now, to be clear, paving the way implies arduous construction work. BTS wasn't the first group to promote in the United States. K-Pop tried that a whopping ten years prior: Se7en, BoA, Wonder Girls, and Girls' Generation all toured and promoted in the US, but it didn't lead to much success, nor did it make Korean entertainment companies think that was a viable path to follow - certainly not while Japan was there, right next to South Korea, with a much more stable audience and surefire success. In the case of Wonder Girls, a common opinion at the time was that their US promotions actively killed the group's momentum - one that JYPE seemingly agreed on when Wonder Girls came back in 2015 with the album title Reboot. And you may think that Psy’s Gangnam Style would have done the trick, what with peaking at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, but no such luck: it was treated as a joke song. But 2017 was a different time. BTS was big, their marriage of maximalist pop music and the calling card of "authentic storytelling" appealed to fans en masse, and their entertainment label Bighit/HYBE was savvy enough to bank on it. So here was BTS, fresh off the immensely successful second full-length album Wings, coming back in September 18, 2017 with a new series titled Love Yourself: Her and the EDM-tinged DNA - a brighter, cheerful cousin to I Need U. Two months later and long after the traditional promotional cycle for DNA, they took this song to another place: the American Music Awards. This performance was in Korean. Thanks to the massive engagement of BTS's fandom ARMY, the song landed at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100 - nine spots over the peak of Wonder Girls' Nobody, which had previously been the highest K-Pop song on the chart. But that was not where the door was officially bust open. It was when BTS promoted Mic Drop, a B-side of Love Yourself that was noisy and boisterous (oh yes, you've read this before)… in English with a remix by Steve Aoki. That remix made the already rock/electronic song more electronic in turn. First they debuted this song on the Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA for short), then promoted it on American morning shows such as Ellen DeGeneres' morning show. Then rapper Desiigner, who enjoyed chart success with the runaway hit Panda, hopped onto the song, and voila: Mic Drop peaked at #28 on the Billboard Hot 100. You hear that? That's the sound of everyone scrambling up. BTS may not have done the hard part of construction, but they tested the road, declared it safe, and cut the ribbon for the masses. Two examples of groups following that path: NCT 127 going from the menacing, dark Cherry Bomb (to Touch, which was part of the NCT 2018 Empathy project... so let's ignore that) to the confident but bright Regular, indebted by Cardi B's massive hit I Like It; Monsta X unrecognizably going synthpop for their debut American single. But in either case, at some point, when talking about the big boygroups of the third generation of Korean Pop music, Monsta X came in third, just after BTS and NCT 127. 

April 2018 also saw the debut of G-IDLE, spearheaded by Jeon Soyeon, a Produce 101 contestant. She is massively involved in her girlgroup's musical identity and, for a while, was everywhere on their titles. They debuted at #1 on the domestic music charts with Latata, and G-IDLE were one of the architects that moved the needled from melodic to boisterous. The other group was Blackpink, who released their smash hit DDU-DU-DDU-DU in 2018. Bang Bang Bang had passed the torch over to Mic Drop, and now that ghost loomed over boygroup music. Monsta X's, not so much. They were already noisy! But it did mean that Monsta X's time in the limelight loomed just around the corner. That's until... but we'll get to that later.

The Connect: Dejavu

Let's recap: a Monsta X song opens with some synths - blunt or ominous - and then percussion kicks in. Wonho is usually the first to sing, a husky baritone. Minhyuk, a frail tenor, follows, and then Hyungwon, whose vocals are halfway between Wonho's and Minhyuk's. Shownu takes over for the prechorus, a strong and dramatic-sounding baritone, perhaps here I.M and/or Jooheon have a little hypeman moment, and Kihyun, a tenor, gets to sing in the chorus. That's his domain, and he sweeps it with some assists by two others who get one line. Then for the second verse, the rappers join: Jooheon, a tenor who is fiery, and I.M, a baritone who takes a detached route. For the bridge, Shownu and Kihyun sing (or they don't sing and Jooheon/I.M rap instead), and there's Kihyun again, all over the chorus. Song over (or I.M finishes it). It's a template with few flexible parts, and the three Korean titles that followed Dramarama don't do much to tweak it. For a fan, there is no need. For a non-fan, that makes jumping in to their discography not as enticing, especially when K-Pop - both as a whole, and within singular artists's discography - has a lot more diversity to offer. (But I said what I said - consistency pays off in dividends.) The Connect: Dejavu, part two of the Code duology, has the lead single Jealousy. The only difference that this song has to other Monsta X titles is that this one goes very heavy on the synths and is almost funky, somewhere between Eurovision Song Contest kitsch and 80s pop music drama. And, this time, there is only Kihyun in the chorus. It is a great song, but I feel a world of difference between the first time I heard it and now, where it simply slots in nicely with the rest. Monsta X has a template, and they always followed it.

With Jealousy, nomen est omen. The Monsta X members like this girl, but she acts flirty to guys other than Monsta X members. A little jealousy, Kihyun shouts with the kind of jealousy that lets you know that's more than just "a little". Even the word elongates and turns green of envy: jealousyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. It's all-consuming. How dare she look at other men or talk to them? Wonho, in a truly hilarious move, breaks the unity of seven members representing one protagonist by asking, Why did you talk about Shownu again just now? When he was asked about this line in a radio show - why did he sing it, isn't it allowed to like more than one member - he said no. The reason why? "Because Shownu is mine." (Wonho has a flawless understanding of fanservice.) Jealousy's music video is not a continuation of Dramarama. It is also drenched in blue and cuts between members before you can focus on their faces in earnest. I have no clue what it is supposed to communicate, but the dancing is cool.

Though Jealousy doesn't go there, there is a poor attempt to bring the time loop aspect back to finish the series in the "music film" that makes extensive use of Destroyer, a rock-influenced B-side. I don't think anything that the music film does here finishes in any way what Dramarama began, and I don't know why they all want to save Hyungwon - who is now trapped in a subway (?) - when Hyungwon tore the couples apart in the first place, but I like the Arrival-inspired set that Wonho and Kihyun are in quite a bit and I also enjoy nonsensical code that is meant to change the space-time continuum.

All that said, The Connect: Dejavu is an incredibly strong release. It is also the first time Jooheon would don a different name tag for his raps - Jooheonie one hunnit (which also sounds like Jooheonie won-hani, you want Jooheon-ie in Korean), which would eventually lead to a change of his stage name, from just Jooheon to JOOHONEY. Musically, there are two main streaks in The Connect: one of letting go and having fun - the rave-esque Fallin' and closer Special - and one of trying to get their lover back in their lives. In that manner, it actually does tie to some of the themes that In Time and From Zero brushed on in the previous release. Musically, there is a clear thread here also - though Destroyer doesn't fully commit to either rap or the big chorus, the pop elements carry over to Crazy in Love, and If Only, though lighter, borrows some elements from soft rock the likes of Coldplay and Oasis. The emotional centerpiece of the album, though, is Lost in the Dream. It utterly commits to the bit, full of melancholy especially with strings in the bridge. This helps both Jooheon and I.M slot into the song - something that doesn't happen a lot - but it also brings in the other members. This release is possibly the first time one can hear Minhyuk's thin vocals for longer than a minute (combined, not separately, I'm afraid), and it is also a release where Shownu in particular sounds much more in control. His turn in Lost in the Dream lends an almost life-or-death feeling to the song. That happens to be my favorite strain of K-Pop, and it is also the strongest point in Monsta X's discography. 

PIECE

Monsta X's first foray into the Japanese market was the Japanese version of Hero back in 2017. (Starship had every right to skip Trespass and Rush.) The first original Japanese single bears the title SPOTLIGHT, released January 31, 2018, which borrows the same whiny sound of Trespass, but couples it with the classic Hero songwriting. After that came PUZZLE, a brighter sound that Monsta X utilized a lot for their Korean B-sides. The first full-length for the Japanese full-length bears the title PIECE. It arrived a month after The Code: Connect and has five original songs in total. The rest are all Japanese versions of titles we've already covered - Shine Forever, Stuck, Ready Or Not, Hero, and Beautiful. It's hard not to think of this album as cashgrab. But artistically, Monsta X would go for a firm dichotomy of noisy and cute for the Japanese market, and you can tell with this release already. Of the original songs, Aura straddles the line best. It is essentially EDM and full of these empty-sounding drums, and there's horns and whatnot in the Kihyun-led chorus, but the skittering synths in the verses give the song a bright feel regardless - you will not be surprised to hear that Wonho kills it here, but I also love Minhyuk in the pre-chorus, who seems like an especially great fit to the production. In either case, following this release, Monsta X released two far superior songs for the Japanese market in the fall - and we won't be able to talk about them all the way until sometime 2019, because that's when the corresponding album came out. What a hilarious rollout. 

Take.1 Are You There?

Did you notice how Monsta X just can't seem to stop doing series? So far, we've had the blue flower trilogy (The Clan) and time loop shenanigans (The Code - The Connect). For their second full-length, which was split into two parts, the "Take" series centered on the lowest hanging fruit for a seven-membered group - the seven deadly sins. (No, Jealousy is not part of it.) The brighter half of the two, Are You There? is once again more of a quest to find a lover - and the rejection of it altogether following a breakup. For their special film, the most striking image here is a single door at the beach, as if opening it would lead to water. It sets the scene quite nicely to the opener to the album: Underwater, which has slowly pulsing synths and the pleading, are you there? that give the album its title. But although Underwater is moody and atmospheric, Monsta X's eighth member returns to the mix after the chorus and utterly detracts from the mood: you guessed it, blunt horns. And so we set the stage to the other side of this album - the one that rejects. Lead single Shoot Out is intense. It turns Monsta X back to the Jooheon and I.M show with scraps for the other vocalists. But those horns are cold and demanding, the percussion sharp and hard like the click of a gun, only briefly pausing for the prechorus for a stunning turn of the vocalists (all four are excellent, but I especially like Shownu and Hyungwon) exploding in the chorus quite satisfyingly. Yes, this is aggression, but also dramatics. Once again, the breakup of the lyrics sounds all-encompassing in the vocal performances, something like life and death. Albeit more archetypal than all other Monsta X titles before, I find Shoot Out one of Monsta X's most accomplished title tracks, and the boob vibration of Shownu in the beginning is nothing short of iconic. Though it must be said, "excuse me, I'm walking like zombie" (and all that AAVE in the rap, my goodness) is not one of Jooheon's lyrical highlights. Not even the worst, I'm afraid.

The biggest strength of the album lies in the second half, specifically in a three-track run. Myself, the last of these, is a murky EDM-esque track that kind of recalls British group Hurts at points, though not interested in reaching their heights. Thankfully, the blunt electric synths are gone and Jooheon & I.M float over the song like the other members. Kihyun sounds perfect on this track especially. Oh My, the song before Myself, is a track that sounds frankly very Middle Eastern in the percussion, a prototype for better and louder (and more Turkish) to come. And then there's MOHAE, Korean for "What are you doing". MOHAE dethroned all previous fan favorite B-side tracks, and it's not hard to see why: the warbly synths and falling piano notes make for a headrush of a chorus. Wonho, Shownu, and Kihyun trade off lines in the chorus, (Minhyuk gets to sing near the end, which is lovely), and all of them sound fantastic. The rest of the verses are fine, nothing to write home about, but the chorus sounds like a revelation. Rounding out the album is Heart Attack, a straightforward pop track with a militaristic percussion that I'm not hot about; I Do Love You, co-composed by Wonho, this one the obligatory cute B-side that bears another stunning vocal performance from Shownu; and By My Side, the song for the fans with gurgly synths I can't stand. The Korean version of Spotlight closes out the album. Overall, it's not exactly a record I care much about, but it has some obvious highlights that deservedly have their spots on fan favorite lists.

Take.2 We Are Here.

K-Pop in 2019 was the point where the genre utterly stalled. This was the year of audacious chanting, blunt synths and metallic percussion that fans quickly dubbed "pots and pans", trap breakdowns, rapping that took over most of the verses, and a vocal that takes over the chorus less singing and more screaming (that is, if there even was a sung chorus, because the anti-drop chorus was very popular and almost always a blight to the music). If that all sounds Monsta X went there before - sans the anti-drop, thank God - that's because they did. (Meanwhile, NCT 127 went against the grain and released straightforward pop that year.) BTS, on the other hand, went full Billboard with Boy with Luv and it resulted in all of K-Pop ignoring the music they did. I genuinely think Monsta X was ready to move to the A-list domestically and internationally. But Take.2 We Are Here's lead single, Alligator, does not introduce a new idea for anyone. That thing I said about sequels with Monsta X unfortunately strikes yet again (and will one last time), as Take.2 We Are Here brings in more budget for the visuals, but has nothing to spend on the music. If I said that Shoot Out was archetypal already, then Alligator sounds like everyone involved went autopilot. It just sounds like Monsta X doing Monsta X things. I like it, but that's because I like the template. Still, it's really hard not to argue that Alligator stalls Monsta X musically. Horns, raps, vocals getting scraps, Kihyun chorus. The hook of the song is Alli-alli-alli-gator. Jooheon's first line in his rap is: "Hello, I'm an alli-alli-gator". The music video has the seven members in seven separate sets... there's vague allusions to the seven deadly sins... Shownu sets a car on fire but has an unfortunate haircut... Kihyun has telepathic powers or something... Minhyuk is surrounded by roses (ha, get it, beautiful man with beautiful roses?) and Wonho looks like a walking sex god in the music video. There are so many sets on this music video. So many glamour shots. Can somebody who is good at the economy please help Starship budget this? My Monsta X is dying.

This album doesn't exactly rank high on fan lists, but that's not to say that it's overall bad - in fact, song by song, I probably listen to this album more often than Are You There?  I find Ghost a little on the nose with a flat chorus, but that's about the only song I'd skip. No Reason offers some of Wonho's best songwriting for the group yet, and this soaring pop approach musical palette is the closest he'd come to his own solo music later. Give Me Dat is a classic Monsta X B-side that has Wonho open with more force in his vocals than ever before - and Shownu after that is simply cherry on top. The song after that, Turbulence (but listed on Spotify as the Korean Nangiryu) is a menacing B-side with an explosive chorus (you already know who's sweeping over it). Rodeo is for the club with a really cool chanting bit from Jooheon in the chorus (!). Stealer is even more intense, delivering a synth-drenched dramatic chorus and never lets up - probably Monsta X's best bid to win a hypothetical Eurovision Song Contest. The vocals here are overall very strong, and it's a joy to hear more of Minhyuk and Hyungwon, who, in turn, sound stronger in their delivery than before. But the song I want to highlight is Monsta X's first foray into the American market. Play It Cool debuts on this album in Korean, produced by none other than Steve Aoki, who had previously remixed BTS's Mic Drop. Play It Cool is more reserved than Mic Drop is, a refreshingly straightforward dance approach with a cool instrumental chorus. Jooheon sings here, and not unsuccessfully so; he'd go on to sing more and better in later tracks. The English version appeared three months later, but was credited first as Steve Aoki, rather than Monsta X, so it's not really the debut single of Monsta X's American discography, only a sign of what was to come.

Who Do U Love? (feat. French Montana)

So after BTS bust the door open, NCT 127 followed things up quickly with the English version of Regular that they extensively promoted in American morning shows. Monsta X also had an English version of Shoot Out at the end of the Are You There? album and appeared at the Jingle Ball of New York City in 2018. And we've already gone through Play It Cool. That dance vibe that they chartered there, though, would go to incredibly icy depths, with their actual American debut Who Do U Love?, released year after Regular and almost two since BTS's Mic Drop. Who Do U Love? features French Montana, which is a baffling decision considering he has never been a rapper popular on the charts or with hip hop fans, but it means that Monsta X's rappers are relegated to singing. For Jooheon, this is a revelation. He opens the song - a reedy tenor that is a great match for the sound palette: airy synths, short snaps, and a drop that is a stronger take on Charlie Puth's Attention, a bouncy bass while all of Monsta X sound like one airy, eerie chorus asking: Who do you love? Is it him or me? Cause I can't take the pressure anymore. I am a sucker for choir-like vocals. When done right, it can sound otherworldly, and in the case of Who Do U Love?, it's a preternatural calm, a foregone conclusion made: that woman does not love this protagonist in any way, and he (possibly a side piece?) knows. Who Do U Love? is one of my absolute favorite Monsta X songs, easily top five, and the fact that this sounds nothing like a Monsta X song makes it so singular. Some of my favorite vocal moments on here are Hyungwon's baritone and Minhyuk's line in the prechorus (dare I say the first time he actually sounds comfortable on a title track?). But Jooheon’s adlibs add just the right amount of pizzazz to the chorus. French Montana delivers a rap verse that is quite hated, but I honestly find it hilarious. The lines "Now the beef cook, like Gordon Rams'" and "My two things fighting like Monica and Brand'" have me in stitches every time I listen closely to the song. I.M? Uh... um... uhh... have I mentioned the sets? Seven members, seven sets, Wonho admiring himself in a room full of CRT screens, Minhyuk is in front of a Turkish rug looking absolutely scrumptious? Right.  This is not the last time an American rapper hops onto an English Monsta X song. But a lot of time would pass until then, and the other English tracks do feature I.M. Just not as a rapper.   

PHENOMENON

Now I could have placed Livin It Up right after PIECE just like I did with Who Do U Love, which was also the lead single to a horrifically long rollout of English album ALL ABOUT LUV.  But chronologically it fits better to connect Play It Cool and Who Do U Love? than to go from PIECE to LIVIN IT UP. So here it is: the first Japanese album called PHENOMENON with its lead single from a year prior. LIVIN IT UP is funky, just like Dramarama and Jealousy, utilizing a distorted bass to guide most of the song. And then bright synths kick in. Unlike Dramarama and Jealousy, it's not dramatic, it's about having a good time on a Friday night. The celebratory tone suits Monsta X quite well, but doesn't do much to change the overall template. The song, and the fact that Minhyuk and Shownu trade lines, actually reminds me a bit of Love Killa, a song I'll cover later. (Minhyuk sounds very good on this in the prechorus, by the way.) But that music video... my Japanese isn't the strongest, but why does everyone look disinterested when the song is about... livin it up? Nice buttslap at the end there, though.

The title track of this album, X-Phenomenon, confirms the route Monsta X went for their Japanese releases: amp up the noise and do not look back. Accordingly, the Korean title tracks that made it on the Japanese version are Alligator and Shoot Out, so I guess it's fuck Jealousy lives. The results are... mixed: X-Phenomenon is kind of like NCT 127's Chain except it has an utterly baffling beat switch in the chorus, FLASH BACK has a whiny flute sound at the back that sounds like Oh My but to lesser effect, and Carry On is yet another cute B-side that Monsta X did better before. I think of this collection, I like SWISH best, which goes into Livin' It Up territory with flat horns and rumbling percussion employed throughout. The middle eight with the rhodes on top is very inspired.

Follow - Find You

Follow - Find You came with a pre-release - serious business in the K-Pop world. Find You is a piano-led, emotional song I'd firmly place in the adult contemporary category - not quite a ballad, but grown, sad music. It's easily one of Monsta X's slowest moments, and the music video paints an extremely sad picture alongside. Hyungwon has a nice time with his friends (the rest of Monsta X - no wait, you haven't heard of this before), and at the end of that night his parents come pick him up. Then out of nowhere, a car crash happens - the horrific kind. Hyungwon is rushed to the ER and eventually wakes up, but his parents do not. He's devastated. Back at home, he tries to drown out the pain with various painkillers. His friends, thoughtful as ever, stay over with him to keep him company, and in one of the loveliest scenes, Minhyuk notices that Hyungwon smiles and gestures it to the rest of the group. But just that is not enough to drown out the grief for Hyungwon, and late at night he wakes up seeing visions of subway wagons and clocks. His father was working on a clock, actually; a wristwatch, bulky and not meant to be worn... he clicks on it, he is thrown into the water? And... uh.. yes, he is the man in the umbrella. Everyone is sad. I honestly had to bust out laughing at the fact that the lore came back like this. But Find You is one very sad song, and as a pre-release, it is one very misleading hint of what was to come with the lead single. 

Follow is the loudest Monsta X has ever been. It takes ten seconds at most for them to chant "Follow-lo-low Follo-lo-lo-lo-low" before a disembodied robot voice going Fire leads to... well, halay. Halay is the Turkish name of a folk dance in which people come together, hands joined, and dance in a circle. One foot moves up, then the other, then people move together. Crucial to this folk dance is the zurna, a wind instrument that brings out a flat, whiny sound - and it's all over Follow. The press release of Follow was talking about traditional Korean instruments, and the taepyeongso indeed sounds like the zurna, but is a little deeper in tone. From the clips I've seen, it doesn't especially inspire high-energy dances. Halay, however, very much does. I'm willing to believe that the lo-lo-lo isn't inspired by Mahmut Tuncer's halay song Lolo, but it's a funny coincidence! The song itself rests upon the flute, teasing it constantly and building up until the explosive release. The most insane bit of this song is... well, there's two: Wonho singing like that in the bridge, and then the tiki taka, hrgh, hrgh part of Jooheon and I.M. You either enjoy the approach Follow has or you find it overly noisy; me, I've danced halay to it. The music video... seven sets, seven handsome men, and Wonho again looking like a sex god. The parts that reference the passing of time with the shadows and the eclipse look simply stunning.  When I say Monsta X was primed for superstardom, I make my case with the incredibly compelling Follow.   

Like the name suggests, Follow - Find You is a neat divide between the loud and the forlorn, and all of it has a high production sheen. The Find You slate includes the acoustic guitar-driven heartbreak jam U R and the slinky, misty Mirror, the last track that Wonho penned on a Monsta X release - and the only time Shownu has a writing credit. Originally debuting on the We Are Here. world tour, Mirror was conceived as a unit song between Wonho and Shownu. The main conceit of this track is a singular, sad saxophone, Careless Whisper-style. The percussion leads the verses alongside watery synths mixed under it. Man in the mirror, Wonho sighs, I hate it, I hate myself. Even when warbly synths add some texture to the chorus, it's a very hazy breakup song. Shownu and Wonho are both airy and sound incredible. And the concert performance... oh yes. Something very gay is afoot. I don't care for the album version and I do not care for the raps added on top of it. On the Follow side come some of my favorite Monsta X B-sides overall: the funky Monsta Truck, the zurna-led Disaster, and the best iteration of the Stuck sound, Burn It Up - the arpeggios and Minhyuk's voice really make it for me, but spare a thought for that breakbeat pre-chorus too. Between these two sides is See You Again, which is sad but also uses a tropical pop sound as the chorus drop. It's possibly their best EP to this day: a true crystallization of their sound and their musical ideas. Yes, other EPs have better tracks, but this is the definitive Monsta X sound from top to bottom.

Three days after Find You came out - so before the release of the EP overall - a clip circulated around Twitter, dating back to a signing event on March 2019. Minhyuk and Wonho are sitting languidly on a couch, and Minhyuk decides to interview... Wonho's nipple. Wonho, less than pleased, goes "Me too! Me too!" in English. Laughter. The Twitter caption says, Monsta X Wonho Minhyuk MeToo caricature. In 2019, amidst the worldwide reckoning of sexual assault, you can imagine this did not go well, especially not when the Burning Sun scandal was on everybody's mind that very year. Though Starship initially said that it was a misunderstanding, which is plausible because its a poor English application of the Korean 나도 (na do), which simply means "I too" - so Wonho wants to be interviewed too - the equally real possibility that this was simply trying to deflect from MeToo being used as a punchline (which men were indeed wont to do at the time) meant that Wonho and Minhyuk personally apologised as well. "I did not think about whether what I said could do harm to the Me Too movement and cause even more suffering to the victims and I disappointed and hurt many people due to my careless words and actions," Wonho wrote. "When I think about it now, I don’t know how I could have said something so ignorant."1 But this wouldn't be the last time Wonho came to the headlines in a negative manner, as that same week, Wonho was alleged to owe Jung Da Eun (a person famous for Ulzzang Generation, a show following prototype influencers, but in 2019 moreso for stirring up shit) money and to have been involved in criminal behavior in his youth, including the consumption of marijuana, theft, and serving time.2 Wonho left the group on Halloween 2019, a move he later said he'd done to minimize the damage around the Monsta X and the other members. He later resigned with Highline Entertainment, a DJ subsidiary of Starship. As for the charges: it was true that he was on probation and was involved with the wrong people in the past, but he had not consumed weed, so he was cleared of those charges. You can read more about it here. Thankfully, Wonho has resumed a musical career, this time as a solo artist. He debuted with Losing You in August 2020, released three EPs and a couple singles, and since December 2022 serves his compulsory military service. He is expected to return to the public eye in August 2024. I will cover his slim, but fascinating discography in a separate post. But the hurt still sits deep for fans. Don't ask a man his salary, a woman her age, and a Monbebe (Monsta X fan) how they feel about Follow.

If it seemed like I pointed out Wonho quite a lot, it isn't simply because he has one of my favorite vocal tones of the group (only some). It's because in the group, he was a very active member. He either opens the titles, or is all over the music videos, or leads the choreography. He has songwriting credits on important and much beloved B-sides all across their discography. So his departure left a hole that Monsta X would need to learn how to fill. (Although there is one more release where we will hear his vocals - the English album.) The next and final time we talk about Monsta X, the pandemic will change everything. In a suspended entertainment world, they will eventually come out on top of the pack. Got room for one more?

Korean Pop music as we know it begins with a boy group that debuted in 1992. Seo Taiji sought to make music like the hip-hop and rap he obsessed over, and the resulting album Seo Taiji And Boys with its lead single I Know became a smash hit in South Korea. The song itself is squarely New Jack Swing, with elements of rock splashed into it, and a chorus that fits within the conventions of 90s hip hop music. There's equal parts rapping and singing, as well as a healthy mix of English and Korean, but the star of the show is Seo Taiji himself: not only does he open the song, he's written it himself.

At the time I Know was first performed on Saturday Night Music Show, Shownu — the oldest member of Monsta X — was two months old. By the time he was ready to debut in 2015, just short of turning twenty-three — the final portion of it dramatized on reality show NO.MERCY — K-Pop had become an entire system by itself. It was poised to break through the mainstream, but hadn't managed to do so fully — it'd take a couple years to reach to that point. Musically, though, a crucial strain from boygroup music never strayed too far off from I Know. There is a very neat line you can draw from I Know to Big Bang to BAP, Block B, and BTS (I think that B bit is more coincidence than on purpose). This line can be characterized by a couple of things: there is an outsized focus on a rapper, who is sort of the musical leader of the group. He and his co-rapper are everywhere on the song. The vocals are loud and dramatic, matching the aggressive nature of these songs. These songs draw from rock and the hard-hitting percussion of hip hop. Everyone's acting really tough. (And there is an overabundance of Black aesthetics employed, especially in earlier iterations of this sound.) There was, of course, a melodic strain of boygroup music as well, one that drew on whatever the United States discarded a couple months prior and was close to J-Pop. In 2015, with songs like EXO’s double-whammy Call Me Baby and Love Me Right, SHINee’s View, and Infinite’s Bad, that strain dominated. But here, too, there was a rapper. There was always English and Korean. Love Me Right and Call Me Baby were loud, and Bad's main conceit was its crunchy percussion. So these strains weren't segregated. Speaking of segregation: girlgroup music, constantly poised for a general listening public rather than just teenage girls, has a slightly different musical history. Later — much later — they would also adopt some noisy elements of the rapping strain of boygroup music. Not in 2015, though.

2015 also brought us one song that didn't fit this dominant strain of vocal-focused music. It was by Big Bang and bore the name Bang Bang Bang, the second single of Big Bang's album MADE. Bang Bang Bang employs blunt synths that sound like electric farts, an intensely propulsive, whiny beat, and then comes the chorus. "Bang bang bang" If that lyrical prowess didn't convince you, this is followed up with: "bang! bang! bang!" Air sirens go off and the percussion takes a lazy backseat. Such is the chorus. Then we're back to propulsion and high-wailing synths. It's a song that is halfway between rave banger and regular pop, as if it wants to have its cake and eat it too. And it not only was a hit — everyone thought they needed to get onto this strain. It was an evolution of 2012’s Fantastic Baby (that also employs an anti-drop of a chorus), but Bang Bang Bang makes wow, fantastic baby like a grim prophecy to what was about to come. And so, the melodic strain of pop music was effectively over after Bang Bang Bang. Luckily, the two groups that would expand on the ideas Bang Bang Bang brought about made music much better than Bang Bang Bang. Monsta X is one of these groups, a group that would straddle the line between the melodic and the abrasive throughout their discography, equally inspired by both Big Bang and Infinite. (NCT 127 is the other, and that group is utterly unafraid to truly ruffle feathers musically.)

But it wasn't just that Bang Bang Bang changed the fabric of K-Pop music. 2015 was also the entry year for a lot of people into K-Pop (a lot, but not all, coming fresh off One Direction's hiatus), and thus this song became one of their entry points. Another: BTS's jubilant Dope, which also employs a mostly instrumental chorus drop, this time with horns! And this was years before BTS became the global phenomenon of today. Lastly, one of the introduction points came from Monsta X, which I'll discuss at greater length later. Once fans were introduced to this sound and stuck around with boygroups not in spite of but because of it, it became the dominant strain and financial model of boygroup music. There became a demand for “pots and pans”, pretty boys, lore, and musical consistency. A new market outside South Korea for all things K-Pop began to blossom: the United States. Monsta X's main fandom was there. If that doesn't sound really interesting to you, consider that this was not financially viable for K-Pop acts up until 2019 or so. Monsta X got by four long years with an international fandom that was larger than the domestic fandom, and they did so with noisy, yes, but melodic and consistent music. NCT 127 and Monsta X paved the way for everything a certain group of people seek out in K-Pop today. They influenced a whole slew of groups that debuted after they did. And when international K-Pop fans jumped Monsta X's ship for younger and louder, when one of the most popular members had a scandal and had to leave, they recouped and were embraced by their home country. In the eighth year of their existence, Monsta X is still an active act. That makes them very exciting to talk about, and I'm very excited to cover them. (NCT 127, I want to cover at another time — I'm already excited just thinking of it.)

Monsta X themselves name Big Bang as one of their inspiration — duh — but there's others, too: Michael Jackson, for instance. The aforementioned Shownu became an idol because of soloist Rain, and Minhyuk because of the visual and main vocal of TVXQ, Kim Jaejoong. Monsta X, that name, though. The AAVE-tinged "Monsta" and X already suggest aggression and wildness and is sustainably nonsensical enough to pass by, but no; monsta is actually short for mon (my in French) and sta, which is the romanized way of the English star. X is for an unknown existence. Never change, K-Pop. Consisting of vocalists Shownu, Wonho (active 2015-2019), Kihyun, Minhyuk, and Hyungwon, as well as rappers Jooheon and I.M, this is Monsta X.

Trespass

While working on this piece, I was curious if Starship Entertainment — Monsta X’s label — had an ambition or a raison d'etre for the group to exist, some kind of lore of the entertainment company, like how NCT came to be because Lee Sooman conceived the group less as one boyband and more as a system (and, also, because he was obsessed with Johnny's AKB48). So I looked up the first bits of the reality show No.MERCY. Hyolyn of SISTAR, a labelmate of Monsta X, says "We're going to debut a boygroup" while the show cuts over to Shownu saying he has to debut or else it's over for him. And Starship Entertainment was serious about Monsta X just... being some kind of financial asset. In a very lucky stroke, BTS and Block B left the noisy rap stuff behind (a bit) in 2015. So Monsta X instantly tapped into a niche before its absence could be felt. But that bit is just luck. The main idea is: just debut the group. 

Trespass sounds dated the second you hear it — not just now, in 2023, but in 2015, when it first came out. An irritating buzz not unlike a mosquito's, amplified much too loud, swirls from ear to ear. As soon as it opens the song it also remains the most interesting bit of this production. The title is an adlib shouted midway through the chorus like its own fan chant, lost in the mix while Kihyun shouts can you call this a crime or how can you hate this. Jooheon, the main rapper, takes real estate of the song not just by singing the chorus and dominating the entire second verse, but also the way all the sticky bits belong to him (knock knock, the instantly iconic silyehamnida, excuse my charisma). And yet, despite all this, Trespass is oddly charming. The irritating buzz stays in the head, and the way the chorus crashes sooner than it really should invites to more listens. The end, in which I.M gets his rap, showcases the dynamic that Jooheon and I.M would expand on again and again: I.M, with his disaffected timbre and fluent English versus Jooheon who vocally hurls himself onto the beat with the fiery energy of a blaze. It's the right call to get I.M at the very end ask Tell me now: who's hot and who's not, making the song much cooler than it was no three minutes ago. You almost admire the chutzpah here. How can you hate this?

Of course, the dated nature of this song also comes from well-established boygroup tropes. Jooheon and I.M get most of the song, the vocalists have to make do with a little bit of verse and a little bit of chorus, which recalls many, many Big Bang, BTS, and Block B efforts. You can also see it in the music video, which takes liberal inspiration from BTS's No More Dream and Block B's Niliri Mambo (bonus: that hair, lol). Wonho flashes his abs for ten long seconds, which feels like a particular bit of foreshadowing to the kind of image he'd become known for, but at the time that was a move guaranteed to get the fangirls screaming (see also: Jimin doing the same move in No More Dream). It's by no means an outstanding debut. If this came out now, people would instantly pan it. In fact, reception of the song back then were less than favorable — the police brutality bit in the beginning is particularly horrible. Somebody on omonatheydidnt (a Livejournal community that spun off ohnotheydidnt) says, "I feel like this whole concept here is 2-3 years too late." Which it was.

The EP to come out of this, also called Trespass, furthers the idea of Jooheon as Block B’s Zico 2.0 (Big Bang’s G-Dragon 3.0) (Seo Taiji 4.0) and I.M as the trusty co-rapper a la TOP of Big Bang by attaching the rap song of the unit Jooheon-Hyungwon-I.M of NO.MERCY at the very end. The skit that ends Honestly follows Dasom of SISTAR and I.M in some lover's quarrel, but sounds more like reading lines off a Korean textbook. Elsewhere, One Love (with the chorus continuing two love, three love) is as faceless as the name suggests, though there's an early promise of Shownu's reedy vocals here. The rest is mostly filler music, the way a lot of K-Pop albums were at the time. 2015 was the first year where complete bodies of work got genuine attention overseas and domestically (f(x)'s 4 Walls, released 2015, is the first K-Pop release US publication Pitchfork reviewed) and, as a result, many entertainment labels — among them, Starship — would follow suit with their artists. In the case of Monsta X, it marks a solid year between debut and consistent music release. But until then, there's always at least one solid B-side.

RUSH

"The first comeback" (or, for normal music fans, the second release) is a trope in K-Pop fan circles (so the "third album" of K-Pop, if you will). After extending the feelers with the debut, which can — though may not be — unidentifiable for the rest of the group's career, the first comeback should reasonably prove the group is here to stay and expand on some ideas thrown in at the start. Later, this can all be discarded again; many groups do. But the first comeback can prove more substantial than the debut. Many iconic K-Pop tracks are first comebacks: Wonder Girls's Tell Me, NCT 127's Limitless, G-IDLE's Hann, Twice's Cheer Up, Infinite's Before The Dawn. Monsta X's labelmates, WJSN, have a particularly pretty one here with Secret; Monsta X's boygroup predecessor, Boyfriend, got Sweetune to produce their adrenaline-filled Don't Touch My Girl. But Monsta X's own first comeback RUSH does not fit this trope — at all. If Trespass sounds dated, then RUSH is instantly dead on arrival and has even less to offer than the debut, a reject of a reject of Zico's "Block B rejects" hard drive that he himself tossed aside as soon as HER blew up in 2014. The sole interesting idea in RUSH are the synths that sound closer to electronics farting, and that is an overstatement. Again, the verses are forgettable and usher to the chorus, and we're back to the electric farts and nondescript "vroom vroom" as a chorus. Now that I type this, maybe this is less from Zico's hard drive and somebody just trying to get their Bang Bang Bang on. Huh!

The rest of the RUSH EP is alright, if a bit light on genuine greatness. (Amen is excluded from this narrative.) But Starship was eager to promote this boyband to a bigger audience — and in 2015, Youtube was a veritable platform for such gambits. Couple that with the fact that B-sides are promoted on music shows, often as follow-up to the lead single, a clip was released on Starship's official Youtube account in October 2015. In the accompanying EP, the track performed ranks right after RUSH and bears the title Hero. As soon as the song begins, it makes RUSH sound like child's play. The ominous, thin synths set the stage for a short Jooheon hypeman moment, followed by a sound of Super Mario leveling up. And then, those horns — forming the basis for the song, pulsing under the vocal lines only to come back to the forefront to the mostly instrumental chorus that repeats I can be your hero, I can be your man. But that's not even the most surprising bit of the song: it's the fact that Monsta X is no longer Jooheon and I.M with some others. The vocal melody, in fact, takes center stage for this song — chief of which is Kihyun, whose vocals sweep with a rockstar fervor for the first time here. (Shownu, nabbing the prechorus spots here, has better moments in other songs) But don't count out Wonho; his voice is thin and nasal, but firmly baritone, utterly comfortable with the beat provided here. And in the video, he's eye-catching not just with his abs flashing (again) but the devilish grin that he sports while dancing in 2:45. Hero changed just about everything for Monsta X; musically, aesthetically, and even in terms of which members got what parts. It marks the first time a more noisy-yet-melodic approach was an introduction point for budding K-Pop fans, and the all-English line in the chorus helped tremendously. Today, it is their most viewed video, eclipsing Rush over five times in total, and their most streamed song on Spotify with 60 million listens. So Starship promoted it in music broadcasts with a new version in what is, to my knowledge, the first and last time any entertainment label released a digital repackage. That version removes the warm horns and adds a scratchy synth to it. I liked that version a lot when Hero first came out, but now I recognize it's totally inferior to the original. And yes, this was my first introduction point to Monsta X, too. It is the archetypal Monsta X song. If you don’t like this one, you will like one of its many, many sons down the line.

The Clan Pt. 1 <Lost>

I mentioned earlier that BTS ditched their original, noisy boygroup style in 2015 somewhat. Let's go back to that a bit. Around two weeks before Monsta X debuted, BTS released their third EP The Most Beautiful Moment In Life, Part 1 (or HYYH pt. 1, which is the abbrevation of the Korean hwayang yeonhwa) with the lead single I Need U. A complete tonal shift from their previous efforts, I Need U traded the shout/rap-heavy titles for a more vocal-based, dramatic one. It did have a drop after a chorus, but it didn’t explode. Instead, it pulled you deeper to the song's core dramatics. The song brought a coveted music show win for them on The Show, where fanvotes decide the winner — it sounds laughable now considering where BTS would go after this (and we're certainly not done covering them here as historical touchpoints / impacts), but this was their first genuine milestone. Just as crucially, I Need U also introduced lore to BTS: pretty boys looking sad, paired off in neat shippable duos, with grandiose imagery of fire and water and pain and a vague sense of a plot following seven boys that were happy together and unbearably sad alone, driven to the point of implied suicide. Following a VCR titled Prologue in August 2015, Run, released in November 2015 as the second installment of the HYYH series, introduced a time travel / alternate universe element that had the fandom discuss possibilities for days on end. That sealed the deal. What this registered as to other entertainment labels was: do the lore, show the boys soft, get the girls talking, and fast. (BTS would pull this same trick many, many times after HYYH was “done”.)

One of the obviously I Need U / Run-inspired music videos of the time was GOT7's Fly music video, released in March 2016. In it, Jinyoung attempts suicide by jumping off a building and remembers all the great things with his other beloved members while flying down. (Terrible song and music video. This wouldn't be the last time GOT7 followed BTS's footsteps closely — Hard Carry is a cousin of BTS's Fire.) The other, and better one, was Monsta X's lead single to their third EP: All In. Kicking off a trilogy on their own named The Clan, All In also follows a storyline that ostensibly looks like BTS's: boys looking sad, paired off in neat shippable duos, with grandiose imagery of fire and smoke and flowers. There's even a bathtub and a prominent usage of dark blue not dissimilar to BTS's Run MV. However, where Run was more about the group preserving together and falling apart when alone, All In is decidedly more romantic. As the story of the music video goes, Hyungwon and Minhyuk are two friends of a gang of boys that seem downtrodden and ready to look for trouble with local authority. When Hyungwon's father beats him up because of it — so much so that Hyungwon has to walk around in a mask of shame — Minhyuk is there to comfort him. In an especially tender moment, Minhyuk pulls away the mask only to reveal the (conveniently not too ugly) bruises on Hyungwon. But the brief respite that Hyungwon receives — inhaling blue flower smoke with close friends (the rest of Monsta X) in a laboratory tucked away — is not enough, and Minhyuk finds Hyungwon dead in a bathtub. Minyhuk pours the same drug that they had inhaled not too long ago into the bathtub and enters it, and they die holding hands. Police take away Hyungwon's father, Shownu burns the package of money they received from dealing drugs (and then, also kills himself), Kihyun walks with a broken leg, and the other Monsta X members watch as the house burns down, everything lost. (I’m going to ignore the strange alien that appears at the end for the sake of narrative consistency.) It's an atmospheric, moody piece, and melodically, All In is more muted than other title tracks of Monsta X’s are or will be. The percussion is slow, but insistent in the chorus, letting the vocals soar and plead as they declare I will bet my whole life on you. (It's vaguely amusing to hear a line go other women are no thanks, no thanks in the music video, though.) Sure, there's still a hint of blunt synths throughout, but there's no big climax in the chorus, and even Kihyun's power note is tucked to the bridge. Such emotional maturity in the songwriting, Monsta X wouldn't go back to until years later.

This EP, The Clan pt. 1 <Lost>, at least begins strong before ultimately fizzling out. Ex-Girl features Mamamoo's Wheein — at the time, Mamamoo enjoyed their first rush of popularity following their first full-length Um Oh Ah Yeh — and the easy listening of this track has stronger production value than previous B-side releases. The other is Stuck, which is the stereotypical Monsta X track following loud electronic backings, dramatic vocals, and the raps leading to the big Kihyun-led chorus. Like Hero, got a music video and was promoted. I may undersell it here, because this song is still great — Shownu in the prechorus is just the right balance between dramatic and forceful, then Kihyun's single fleeting line and Wonho sealing the deal with his nasal voice, it's a bit I was obsessed with at nineteen and still admire even now. Ultimately, between All In and Stuck, Monsta X would expand on the latter's musical ideas more than the former. But that makes All In all the more remarkable.

The Clan Pt. 2 <Guilty>

The sequel of Lost came out in October and bore the title Guilty. If you thought that this title meant that Monsta X would continue exploring the semi-decent attempt at homosexuality that they set themselves out to in All In — no. I don't know what the Fighter music video is about, and Hyungwon and Minhyuk aren't together in this one, either. But there's a bunch of cool moments of Wonho, who gets to weld with his arm muscles nicely out (same with Shownu, who dances really well, but Wonho has a better hairstyle and isn't shrouded in shadows, why lie), and the Stranger Things-inspired title drop is cool. The song is not dramatic and moody. It's celebratory in the same way winning an arduous fight is: the horns may go off, but the vocals are kind of restrained, almost close to talking in the chorus, and with the lyrics on trying to preservere and whatnot, the mood is certainly consistent. But we went from I'll bet my all on you to I'm a champion, so... suffice to say this is less a sequel and more a detour. I was never hot on this song. In the long term, the rock inklings prove an interesting prototype for what was about to come. In the short term, Guilty came with the strongest set of B-sides yet.

Right after Fighter comes Be Quiet, a song that drops its electronic farts ten seconds into the song. Those synths take real estate in the chorus, but what is so enjoyable on the song is the prechorus bit that leads up to the release with the interplay between Shownu and Kihyun. There's glass breaking in there. At some point Jooheon goes, bitch please, which makes me laugh to this day. Most of the song is built around this gyro drop, always climbing up just to fall again. And at the end there's a chanting bit that is obviously a tip of the hat to Bang Bang Bang and its ilk. In any case, this is noise that sounds good — nobody is quiet in here. Queen is also noisy but more in the Stuck way (I.M's declaration of I be your king and baby you be my queen is very fiery here). There's danger in here sonically, with a pinging not unlike a submarine's sonar radar throughout. If you're looking for Wonho here, he's near-unrecognizable in the song, tucked in the second verse. White Love (the Korean says "White Girl") is a song for the fans, all acoustic guitars, and Roller Coaster is a cute little bit employing twinkling synths and a generally brighter palette, very enjoyable and a strong closer. There's one song I didn't mention here. It places in the middle of the EP, right after Be Quiet. It's also by the guy that made the DOA song Rush, Giriboy. I promise you... nothing prepares you for the instant tonal whiplash from Be Quiet to a sex jam, Blind. When I say sex jam, please don't think of the babymaking songs that Sade got in their discography. K-Pop doesn't really have that. But the prechorus goes She go low, I go up... so... you know. In Blind, the synths pulsate. The vocals lilt, almost prowl - it's strange to hear Kihyun of all people take a strained note here. (Wonho, again, totally in his element here.) For the chorus the production bursts a little, but not too much so as to alienate the mood. There's raps, but nobody is fiery; Jooheon and I.M are both slow, almost taunting. Show me your world, the members croon in Korean at the end. All of Guilty is strong, but Blind was the song to beat. For two years it would be the Monsta X b-side for fans.

The Clan pt. 2.5 <Beautiful>

The first full-length album is nothing to scoff at in the Korean pop music world — it means the entertainment label thinks the group is worth the financial investment for such endeavors. Albums cost money, and they're not going to sell by themselves, do they? So to cap off the trilogy of The Clan, which at this point has nothing to do with any kind of clan, Monsta X released their first full-length record a year after the whole endeavor began. That two and a half in the name befuddles me, because this isn't half-anything. Beautiful, the album, is made up of new songs, and is a generally strong effort (and its deluxe, with lead single Shine Forever, is alright, too). Beautiful, the title track, makes for a good final, pulling from some ideas of the Guilty EP. The bubbles and squeaks in the beginning (a watered-down variant on SOPHIE's ideas) coupled with the rapidfire snaps and scratches sound like a rush to the head. Jooheon and I.M go back to back on the song, and the dizzying speed of their raps makes for such a satisfying start that Shownu's part in the prechorus feels like you are pulled away from things forcibly. The first thirty-seven seconds of the song though... I was crazy over it six years ago. I'd loop the song over and over again just to get to the start. The rest of the song is fine, mostly electronic, with the members floating the song with ease — Hyungwon in particular has the coolest bit, you are so pretty, he sings in Korean, so beautiful it makes me sad - too beautiful to handle in English to emphasize the point. There is a wistfulness to his baritone vocals that really sells the idea of the song. The horns after the chorus are kind of lame, though. Where's the snaps!

The music video here is a concept Monsta X would return to again and again. Seven members are in their own sets and different colors, looking simply stunning. The members dance together, which looks cool, especially when jackets are taken off. Shownu dunks something on a flower here that is a nod to All In, but that's it with the references. Jooheon walks through a corridor that recalls EXO's Lucky One music video. The other six members are locked in and then get out. Point is, they look great, especially Hyungwon.

The rest of the album is quite strong. Ready Or Not opens the album and employs cool pan pipes in the prechorus. Calm Down is loud in the Be Quiet way. I Miss You is searching and uses tropical pop tropes that were popular at the time. All I Do is a snippy, bright pop piece, and 5:14 (Last Page) a very gentle, slightly nostalgic-tinged song for the fans. But tucked in all these songs is Wonho's first writing and composing credits: Oi (not the Japanese oi, but more like O-I, which goes like: O-I O-I O-I eh in the chorus) is fast-paced, loud, with a synth that slithers in the chorus. The verses are more drawn back. Everything leads to the chorus, which is par of the course for a lot of Monsta X B-sides. Nothing that this song does reasonably suggests anything that Wonho will touch on, though, which is hilarious to me. (I'll Be There, which is the other song where Wonho has both songwriting and composition credits, is closer to his style, if a bit light on musical greatness.) It reminds me a lot of the late Jonghyun's first songwriting credit for SHINee, which was Up & Down on the 2010 record Lucifer. Regardless, Oi is a lot of fun and looks great on Wonho's songwriting credit list.

Newton

Product placement songs and K-Pop go hand in hand. (Cynics may say K-Pop is already advertisement, and this is true to an extent, but really so is just about everything under capitalism) Some of the best K-Pop songs of all time are product placements: SNSD's glitchy Visual Dream and NCT 127's clubby Save. For Lipton Ice Tea, Monsta X released Newton, billed as a "special summer single". The song is a total outlier in their discography — it's bright and summery, utilizing synths that soar in the chorus. (The rap is not, which makes the song at once more familiar and worse.) The treat here is Shownu's vocals in the prechorus and the chorus, his baritone making the song more interesting than it really is. The most interesting part of this song is its shelf life — in May 2020, this song was used in the K-Drama Tale of the Nine Taled, to the surprise of Korean and international fans alike. Imagine Newton being your first Monsta X song. 

The Code

So far, we're only two years and a couple months into Monsta X's discography. Of eight. It's a lot of music — Monsta X never rested, and there will come a period where they have new music every month or so. This is not standard by any means, not even for boygroups, but it goes to show that Monsta X weren't a household name and desperately needed to be. It also goes to show that the way to stick around in this Korean pop industry is to never let people forget that you're around. The Code makes for a good capping off point for this first part, because lead single Dramarama is what got Monsta X their coveted first win on a music show - The Show, the same show BTS won two years earlier. For Monsta X, it was two years and a couple months since their debut, and that, for K-Pop standards, is quite the long time to wait. Monsta X persevered all the way until that point. Also, despite The Code being part of a duology, one thing about Monsta X is that continuity means detour more often than not, so this milestone completes the early era nicely.

Part of the reason why Monsta X had to bide their time for this long was because it was hard to stand out. 2015 to 2017 boasted some of the strongest K-Pop has ever been - not only that, certain debuts utterly eclipsed all the other rookies (NCT 127, Blackpink, and the Produce series spawning IOI and Wanna One). BTS was on the rise with music that was not too far off from what Monsta X did. Another part boils down to shifting trends and target audiences - but really, at the end of the day, luck is always part of the reason somebody succeeds and another fails. Just to give some context, 2017 was also the year Brave Girls' Rollin was released - firmly in the tropical pop trends of the time, it gained a sudden stream a whopping four years later. Dramarama was not tropical pop. It actually paid off an inherent promise Monsta X's music gave: that with all the noise made, they might as well dip into rock music. (This was a promise that Block B fulfilled in 2012 already. Monsta X would dip further into rock in their later years.) Dramarama's main conceit is the bass that appears pretty early into the song, and paired with its loud snare/kick combination, the song communicates a cool distance. Things don't change for the chorus, either, turning the song to a consistent plane... almost, though, because there comes the bridge and I.M and Jooheon trade off verses with Kihyun shouting in the background. And then we're back to the chorus and the bass and the snaps. Dramarama isn't fully rock, and it isn't a complete reinvention. But it brought about a new idea, and the a capella bit of Dramama ramama ramama hey, dramama ramama ramama hey in the beginning made for a sticky hook. 

The music video, which is frankly more off-the-wall batshit dramatic than any point of the song (barring the climax, maybe), once again introduces lore that Monsta X would return to time and time again. But unlike BTS — who were more than content with tying Blood, Sweat, and Tears that also came out in the same time period as Dramarama back to the HYYH lore — Dramarama introduces a new story and an element I'm personally always excited about: that of time travel and time loops. We begin the story with the text Time Traveler Skips Town! on a newspaper. Barista Minhyuk goes about his day, Wonho admires a watch in the year 2047 while a female voice intones, Do not take any personal watches, and Kihyun is dismayed at his job — always thinking of his friend Jooheon. Things change, though, when Kihyun receives a wristwatch from a stranger. Minhyuk notices the same wristwatch left on a desk, and when he runs out to give the guest the watch back, the guest has disappeared. It's a peculiar wristwatch, quite bulky and seemingly not meant to be worn. It displays a year and has a button. Turns out it's a time machine, and the mechanics are already old hat to Wonho: he clicks his way back to his kendo friend Shownu and leaves again for... time-space constraint reasons? Melodrama? A shower scene lets the viewer know he's not happy about having to leave, and longing glances in Shownu's direction — who has no idea his friend is from the future — let us know there's something gay afoot. For Minhyuk and Kihyun, things are different. Minhyuk is cornered by Men In Black-looking guys and has to be saved by I.M - turns out they were childhood friends? The storyline is a bit vague here. Kihyun gets the biggest portion of the story. After having a great trip together, Kihyun leaves the car and waves Jooheon goodbye — Jooheon doesn't look at the road ahead, and what would you know, now the car's doing cartwheels on a perfectly straight road (just like in Infinite's The Chaser music video!) Kihyun wants to save him but there he is: Hyungwon, the man with the umbrella, who handed Kihyun the wristwatch in the first place. Having already guessed Kihyun's plan, he first gives Kihyun the chance to save Jooheon — but when that leads to the car accident in the first place, the only choice is an alternate universe in which Kihyun drives the car himself. The Men in Black zap Minhyuk away from I.M, and Wonho is taken to a chair and forcibly removed from Shownu. Hyungwon seems behind all of it. In the end, everyone is unhappy — and Kihyun dead, with Jooheon now dismayed at his job (that was Kihyun's job). Why Hyungwon has a grudge on everyone but Kihyun in particular, no idea. But one could say that Hyungwon may have been mad from a past life... one where he inhaled blue flower smoke with people that looked just like Monsta X... omg, I cracked the code! I don't watch a lot of music videos, let alone rewatch them, but Dramarama is one I really enjoy and go back to a lot. 

Accompanying EP The Code is another consistently strong release that has a clear line from exciting to more quiet and back to exciting again. Highlight Tropical Night is not exactly tropical, but utilizes synths and accelerates quite nicely towards the chorus. From Zero, another strong B-side, is tropical pop music that was pervasive all over 2017's K-Pop landscape. It is also one of two B-sides of The Code that plays with the time manipulation concept (the ballad In Time is the other one). Drawing inspiration from the 2013 film About Time, Wonho's lyrics detail a protagonist regretting the way things went between him and a lover. But though they can't forget nor erase everything... he sure would like to try to reset the clock and take everything back from the start in which no mistakes could be made. For Arirang's Pops in Seoul segment, Wonho summarizes the film About Time to be about that — as if there wasn't a (shittily employed) time manipulation element in the film! But some lyrical ideas and vocal turns here are very Wonho-esque: feeling lacking in the relationship, wanting to return to an undefined happier point in time, a faint plea: come back to me, he intones in his fragile falsetto after the chorus, from zero zero zero zero. The song itself, he mentions, was meant to complement the dance it was originally conceived for, so the instrumentation takes its time here and bursts at the right places, which is after the chorus. Even then, its beat is comfortably midtempo. Originally, the song was meant to be performed by Wonho and Hyungwon, and in the concert version of this song, both vocalists float on the song's instrumentation. In the version that eventually made it on the album, the entire group sings, and the floating feel is reserved for the post-chorus that is now shared between Minhyuk and Wonho. Shownu is in the verses and pre-chorus, in total control and injecting a firm wistfulness to the song. (Kihyun, again, shows some restraint here, but then again this isn't a song to sing like a rockstar.) There's also rap sections that do what Jooheon and I.M usually do. The unit song lampshades the kind of music Wonho would go for solo, and the group song lampshades the kind of music the group would tackle... in English.

The next part will begin in the year 2018, generally considered the first year of the fourth generation of K-Pop. Amidst a changing landscape, new boygroups going down the noise path, and one group that bust open the gates to the United States, Monsta X do what they always do - but also throw in a surprise or two along the way.

On the last post, there was only Nine Inch Nails: Trent Reznor, the Pennsylvania-born auteur with a penchant for the dark sides of the human soul. But if you were to ask Trent Reznor about his current projects, especially sometime 2014, he will tell you it’s Nine Inch Nails, soundtrack work with partner Atticus Ross, and How to Destroy Angels, a side-project including Ross, Mariqueen Maandig (Trent Reznor’s wife) and visual artist and collaborator Rob Sheridan. Each of these projects tap into the same result through different means, forming a spectrum of cold depersonalization and white-hot anxiety. Yet that still won’t complete the NIN-verse because there’s also Reznor’s production credits for other artists that need to be taken to account, wherein the creativity and musical ideas seem boundless and exacting at once.

As such, this Potpourri is split in three parts, each with their own headings.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

The 1996 game Quake is an incredibly tense experience. Without much preamble, it practically throws the player into decayed buildings, unvisited temples, and haunted dungeons where no human should walk around. All of these buildings are filled with beings that want you dead, and the sooner you find the key that unlocks to the next stage, the better. Though the walls don’t cave in (usually), every monster killed and reviving make you feel like they will very soon — especially thanks to that soundtrack, an electronic, often grimy affair that raises every hair on your arm. Each shot is loud, each pierce of the bullet crunches, and when a zombie howls, you hear it echo no matter where. Good thing there’s weapons. You got an axe, a shotgun, a grenade launcher… and Nailguns. The ammo of the Nailguns are called Nails, and on the packs there is one peculiar logo: a NIN, except the second N is mirrored.

The credits for the sound effects — including the grunts of the protagonist — read Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. It’s the NIN logo. Of course.

The Quake soundtrack isn’t talked about much when the discussion turns to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack work — probably because it doesn’t feature Atticus Ross at all, who met Reznor in 2001 and worked with him ever since — but provides a very early blueprint for the eventual soundtrack music they would be awarded for: the sound of unease and anxiety, the moment when something is afoot but it’s unclear what, the feeling of vicious ice creeping up on the limbs. But on the best projects, Reznor and Ross have more tricks up their sleeve: tentative pieces full of hope, moving piano solos evoking sweet nostalgia, and drones that calms the mind. Barring Bird Box, where the music was mixed so low as to be barely audible, the music is both memorable and secondary, completely melting into the mood and making the mood at the same time. But you can’t get the Nine Inch Nails too far away from the film’s soundtrack. Sometimes it only lurks; other times, its presence is so dominating that one has to check credits to make sure they have the artist right.

In either case, the duo’s modern, studio-heavy approach has been awarded for an Oscar twice, once for the Facebook drama The Social Network in 2011 and once for Pixar’s Soul ten years later. They current promote their soundtrack work to 2022’s most buzzworthy film, Luca Guadagino’s Bones and All starring Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell; and with news that they will score Luca Guadagnino’s next film starring Zendaya, suffice to say that this is one very lucrative act.

Hand Covers Bruise

from The Social Network (2010)

How does one soundtrack a movie of people only ever talking? By seeing through the fog of bullshit and underscoring it with icy dread. That runs through all four minutes of Hand Covers Bruise. The foreboding drone builds anticipation to a sudden, ostensibly clean piano at the start, eventually leading to more drones that cool the temperature to frosty degrees. Fincher originally conceived this movie as an “odd Hughes film” but the song reveals the darkness lurking underneath the film, its defiance; a perversion, almost, of the self and society. As soon as Fincher heard Hand Covers Bruise, he knew it would be the title and form a triptych, in which every time the listener heard it, the piano would sound farther and farther away until it was so soft as to become almost nostalgic, a memory of a friend who once was. Through Hand Covers Bruise, it becomes clear that The Social Network could only be a film by David Fincher. It stands to reason why this track not only marks the most iconic moments of the movie, but also makes them as iconic as they are. To think that Reznor initially said no when David Fincher contacted him for a score!

Juno

from Visions of Harmony (2016)

The idea that space has no sound is a misconception, and to prove it, NASA released an audio clip of sounds coming from a black hole on August 23 of this year (edited and mixed in with other data so it’s audible to humans). For the commemoration of space probe Juno’s arrival to Jupiter six years prior, NASA and Apple Music released the eight-minute short film Visions of Harmony, in which the principal investigator of the mission and three artists come together to discuss the boundlessness of music and space. Throughout the movie, there is not a single moment of silence. There is a ripple of drones that sounds surprisingly similar to the black hole sounds, progressively swelling louder. It is coupled throughout with clear, resonating piano notes and a drone that sounds warm and welcoming. The ebb and flow of the drones and atmospheric texture of Juno never stay still: the piano notes change to clear synth, melodies are changed and adapted to the narration, and the drones themselves are swapped out at will. None of this ever comes in the way or creates a jarring listening experience; it’s eminently pleasant and subtly engaging. Juno sounds as if the dust cleared, you’d be treated to the most magnificent sunrise mankind has ever seen. It is the vision of something expansive, unknowable, but unbelievably comforting.

OWL HUNTS RAT

from WATCHMEN: VOLUME 1 (2019)

Originally, Reznor and Ross weren’t sure what, exactly, the sound of WATCHMEN was going to be. Creator Damon Lindelof kept talking about the premise in an initial interview, a remix of the original 1960s comics by Alan Moore, and as each plotline is as nestled into the other as Matryoshka dolls, the question became: were they even capable of reaching towards the extremes that the narrative did? It turns out that not only did WATCHMEN’s expansive, three-CD soundtrack manage to reach towards genres previously untapped by Nine Inch Nails — full-fledged jazz, touching piano covers to George Michael and David Bowie, club beats previously hinted at in 2005’s Only — but also smuggle in actual Nine Inch Nails. OWL HUNTS RAT, in particular, showcases the rejuvenated NIN of the Bad Witch trilogy, with its icy synths, tiptoeing notes, howling sax, and layers and layers of fuzzy drones on top of it all, turning to something of an organ in the middle that has been so distorted that it sounds like an electric saw that cuts through metal. It’s the kind of song that will have you walk straighter if it ever came on shuffle, but also the type of song that depicts a downward spiral in dizzying speed like a gyro drop to hell. A shot of pure adrenaline and dark confidence injected in the slickest, most visceral manner possible: the descriptor to the greatest Nine Inch Nails tracks go much the same way.

Falling

from Soul (2020)

In his Masterclass lecture on creative writing, author Neil Gaiman recalls the time when he read the first novel he ever wrote, a draft in the attic that no one will ever get to see. A lot of it was chock full of a rookie writer’s first clumsy move, but then there was the end, which didn’t sound like a poor attempt at other author’s voices. It sounded like him. There is something limiting about the idea that at the end of the day, you can only ever be you: that the promise of becoming anyone you ever want to be doesn’t hold up, that every choice taken means that there are a dozen choices not taken, molding you to the person that you felt you were always destined to be. But at the same time, there is also nothing else like recognizing someone by the very first note, their peculiar flourish; and to hear their unique timbre in an unfamiliar setting? That is exactly what the pristine, forty-one seconds long Falling is. These are glitchy electronics, deep drones and pristine and pretty piano notes in what’s ostensibly a children’s film, the musical equivalent of a snow angel caught in old 3D glasses, where the three pictures won’t quite turn to one. It is a moment of excitement, caution, and odd welcoming. Makes sense since the plot of Soul is about a man who dies and needs to learn how to love life in order to fully gain it back. And the afterlife — called Great Beyond in the film — has a very look and feel akin to Windows 11. Falling is a take of one of our most familiar sounds, the ring of computers booting up, one that could only come from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

How To Destroy Angels

1999’s The Fragile saw Trent Reznor at an extreme low point in his mental health. Addiction drove him to one of two options, survival without drugs or death, but at the time of making the album, producer Rick Rubin suggested he take a break at a remote place so he could write songs in peace. The thing about being alone when you feel at an all-time-low is that it has an amplifying effect on the demons, even somewhere as pretty as the sea outside; and in Reznor’s case, he thought of contemplating suicide there and then. Of that retreat, only La Mer made it. The Debussy-indebted piano piece is soon cracked open by the percussion. A soft voice intones lyrics in Creole French, adding at the end: “Nothing can stop me now”. It’s unclear what she is going to do, and The Fragile is no album that offers many answers in the first place. Perhaps it doesn’t need to, anyway. Preceeding a 2009 performance of the song, he disclosed: “I’m going to be married [at the retreat].” The woman he was going to be married to is the vocalist of side project How to Destroy Angels, Mariqueen Maandig Reznor, formerly lending her vocals for West Indian Girl.

At its best — when it isn’t less an intersection between soundtrack act and Nine Inch Nails, as it often tends to be — How to Destroy Angels carries the spirit of La Mer: tentative vocals by Maandig, plucked acoustic instrumentations, a mind roaming through the melody absentmindedly, the precipice of life and death and the futile attempt to draw a line between the two. Whether it’s the wall of noise on 2010’s eponymous debut EP cut Parasite or the more electronic second effort An Omen EP_, the project deals in the primal. If it sounds firmly in the present, like Speaking in tongues, it floats over a city with the distanced eye of a scientist; and on cuts like The Believers, the marimba transport the listener to so far back into time it’s as though one could witness the first humans paint on cave walls. 2013’s full-length Welcome Oblivion works as an early prototype to the trilogy (Not The Actual Events - Add Violence - Bad Witch) three years later: electronics standing in for a computer-addled anxiety, ominous piano notes, a world of wires or a total lack thereof, life beyond humans. Only artists who work so much with technology could fear the evils of it, think of human life as an experiment that randomly happened to work out in the long course of history. It’s likely why critics found a kinship with a popular franchise that deals with the same anxieties: The Matrix, the first movie released in 1999. Neo was presented with a red or blue pill, to wake up or keep dreaming. Reznor, too, was presented with two options. He chose life: he and his wife have welcomed their fifth child in 2020.

The Producing Credits

Prick — No Fair Fights

from Prick (1995)

Before Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor was keyboardist for Kevin McMahon’s new wave band Lucky Pierre in 1988. Seven years later, Reznor would produce four songs for McMahon’s second project, Prick, on Reznor’s imprint Nothing Records. Most of Prick’s self-titled record take on grunge and industrial rock with fresh melodic ideas assisted by McMahon’s reedy, elastic vocals. No Fair Fights, right at the end of the first half, posits McMahon and his reverberating voice against Reznor’s piano. Soon, it starts to tweak and tick into the silence, but the real ace up No Fair Fights’ sleeve shows up two minutes in: distorted guitars charge forward, a tease to the final, which electrifies in a clear nod to Queen. McMahon is more than up to the task, growling in tandem with the howling guitars.

12 Rounds — Me Again

from My Big Hero (1998)

It’s easy to think that “Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross” means that it’s really only “Trent Reznor”. Part of that is because he’s the more famous of the two, and his penchant for polychromatic piano chords and pristine mixing quite easily identifiable. But being billed second doesn’t mean Ross plays second fiddle, and on trip-hop outfit 12 Rounds, the drones will be familiar to anyone who has listened to a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack. Me Again, the penultimate track of sophomore record My Big Hero, comes closest to the soundtrack style that the duo would be employed for time and time again: foreboding, sultry, and eerie as is par of the course for the genre, all of it combined with lucidity and darkness. Claudia Sarne’s vocals has none of the melancholy of a Beth Gibbons and Tracey Thorn: this is someone who fully embodies want when she purrs Got all the things I ever needed / Screaming at my door. Atticus Ross has done both the programming and the drumming for this record, and it’s easy to hear where his clean mixing would join in seamlessly with Reznor’s preferred style.

Saul Williams — Skin of a Drum

from The Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (2007)

At the end of the Closer episode of Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s podcast, experimental hip hop duo clipping are invited to talk about Nine Inch Nails. The question is: what does a skinny white man doing industrial music have anything to do with rap music? The answer, for clipping, lies twofold: one, a remix of Puff Daddy’s Victory (that does predictable Reznor-isms in the middle with an explosion of guitars three minutes in), and two, Saul Williams’ The Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, produced by Trent Reznor. The thought that “there should be more songs that sound like this” is what led to the creation to clipping. and it is easy to spot the similarity between the pitch-black pits of Say The Name and Saul Williams’ Skin of a Drum, featuring thundering stomps, marimbas, and rattling chains. The rapping, so to speak, is more of an intoning of a poetry than an actual flow here. In the chorus, Williams switches to singing, sounding eerily like Reznor, while electric guitars swell at the back. Rock and rap had a fling in the early 00s, what with nu-metal and Jay-Z collaborating with Linkin Park, and later, artists like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti melted it to one slush altogether. But Skin of the Drum with its ominous beat and cryptic lyrics — still sounds like nothing else out at that time. Today, it marks the prototype for underground hip-hop at large.

Halsey — Easier than Lying

from IF I CAN’T HAVE LOVE I WANT POWER (2021)

Asking your musical heroes to produce your record — and only them, or else it would never be made — requires reckless abandon and nerves of steel, but if anyone has those things in spades, it’s Ashley Frangipane aka Halsey, who did just that and asked Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to produce her follow-up to the commercially successful Manic. Their fingerprints are all over the record, and so are old collaborators: Lindsay Buckingham (who played guitar on 2013’s Hesitation Marks) on Darling, Dave Grohl (who drummed on 2005’s With Teeth) on Honey, and Alan Moulder (engineering and producing tracks for Reznor since 1996) on the dizzying highlight and rager Easier than Lying. Easier Than Lying features more NIN hallmarks: bells from the soundtrack work, electric guitar nothing short of NIN sometime The Fragile-era, and drums a staple from Atticus Ross’s repertoire. Female vocalists are nothing new in the NIN-verse, but besides Claudia Sarne, they tend to be fragile and timid, almost amateur in their approach. Halsey comes closer to the time the duo worked with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs virtuoso Karen O for a cover of Immigrant Song: like her, Halsey is expressive and elastic, the centerpiece that brings everything around them together. When Halsey sent the first version of four songs that would be on If I Can’t Have Love…, among them this one, Trent Reznor told Halsey these were alright songs, but music to put to the background to; they deserve better than that, weirder. It’s hard to imagine a calmer, safer version of any track on Halsey’s fourth record, and least of all Easier than Lying. Harder, still, to think of a producer duo better suited to bring out the rockstar potential that has long been building up in Halsey’s career. But it goes both ways: as much as Reznor and Ross brought Halsey’s edginess out, Halsey brings much-needed color and vital earnestness out of the angular, singular visionaries.

twitter | ko-fi | retrospring

For the optimal reading experience, please read this on your browser.

Potpourri, aka a medley. This post will not detail every single release / production credit and talk about them in the detail that the songs deserve. Rather, my aim is to sample songs that have fallen under the radar, are noteworthy, or simply songs I like that I hope you will enjoy too. It’s not a best of, God forbid. And there is no Closer on here — please just listen to it anyway, if you haven’t.

A day after Kurt Cobain’s untimely death in 1994, a distressed user posted the observation on a Google group called alt.music.nin that Cobain’s passing was a month after the release of The Downward Spiral, a peculiar concept album about suicide that was the breakthrough of the equally peculiar Nine Inch Nails. A low-hanging fruit if Wai Cheng ever saw one:

It almost is shockingly appropriate that the NIN title Track "the Downward Spiral" describes exactly how Kurt Cobain commited [sic] suicide...1

The fact that Cobain had plenty of issues before the release of The Downward Spiral notwithstanding — thus this post being bogus — there are still a couple observations to be drawn from the post. To think of Nine Inch Nails when the topic is about Nirvana does make it clear that, as far as the “alternative” movement went in the early 90s, both were at its vanguard. And Nine Inch Nails is a project that has dealt with dark subject matter since its debut in 1989, with frontman/producer/multi-instrumentalist Trent Reznor’s pen best known for its unadorned, vulnerable detailing of depression, despair, frustration, rage, even suicidal ideation, derealization, and depersonalization. The equally in-your-face vocal presentation are underscored with drums that crack like a whip, nasty guitars, and a chorus so guttural it could double as a war cry — it leads one to think that this is all that Nine Inch Nails, or NIN for short, is about. But Nine Inch Nails wasn’t just a band for angry teenage boys. They weren’t even industrial — Reznor even rejected the label2. NIN could be sentimental, romantic, life-affirming; NIN could be rather poppy if Reznor wanted to be (he often was); and despite speaking against gangsta rap and its aged nature3, Reznor sampled (even remixed!4) like a hip hop producer. His immense talent as producer and composer would lead him to winning Grammys for both Best Metal Performance in 1992 and Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media in 2013. And what to say of the iconic story of the sample that a young Black man bought, leading Lil Nas X to superstardom and Trent Reznor indirectly5 to his first Billboard #1? To think that sample was part of a throwaway 4 CD album of drafts!

In 1995’s Clueless, Travis says that “The way I feel about Rolling Stones is the way my children are gonna feel about Nine Inch Nails.” Across 30+ years (!), releases dubbed “Halos”6, two side projects (one of which eventually became the main project), a protégé with a nasty fallout7, a great many releases, even if you think you don’t know Nine Inch Nails, you’ve likely heard them before: Halsey’s latest album was produced by them, and Old Town Road was unavoidable. Final Destination features a song off The Fragile that features the movie name; to Lara Croft, they are “easy listening”8; and Brie Larson sports a NIN shirt in one scene of Captain Marvel. NIN’s influence and impact reached groups such as Linkin Park and Deftones and reaches all the way to today: Billie Eilish and Tyler, the Creator were creepy at the start of their careers because Trent Reznor was creepy first. Among all this, Closer is living its second life in the world of TikTok; safe to say the kids don’t feel any different about Nine Inch Nails than the teens of 1994.

Nine Inch Nails, from 1989 to 2016, was Mercer, Pa.-born Trent Reznor, and is, per the first press release in 1989, an artistic platform through which reznor’s myriad of emotions become threateningly palpable rhythms and dark, ominous melodies9. This is a man who won a Grammy with the lyrics fist fuck and an Oscar for scoring a Pixar film almost thirty years later, described as “more like three-inch nails”10 by Courntey Love. Welcome to the dark, sad, and emotional world of Nine Inch Nails.

Head Like A Hole

released on Pretty Hate Machine (Halo 2), October 20, 1989; as single (Halo 3) on March 22, 1990; re-issued November 22, 2005

God money, I’d do anything for you… Head Like A Hole is a stylish blend of both synth-pop and rock, although its guitars in the chorus do lean the song more into rock territory than other tracks on Pretty Hate Machine (Down In It has Reznor rap for the first and last time). It’s a muscular, forceful track that features a catchy double chorus, an excellent bridge, and an impassionate vocal decrying a “you” but asking the “you” to bow down before the one they serve. (My favorite moment is the gnarl in the second pre-chorus: nnnno you can’t take it!) What the song is really about? A rebellion towards the small town he grew up in, or the world at large? A general anticapitalist, anarchist rally? Who knows! It’s a common thread for Nine Inch Nails to favor emotions over narrative and the feeling in question — vivid frustration neatly packaged in an incredibly catchy song clocking in at 115 bpm — is unmistakable. Head Like A Hole would enjoy heavy rotation on initial release, much to the initial chagrin11 of Reznor, who wrote the song in about fifteen minutes, and enduring popularity long after. It’s also one of NIN’s most covered songs by artists as varied as Devo, AFI, as well as one by Korn and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington12 that never saw the light of day. And who could forget the pop reinvention On A Roll, performed by Miley Cyrus on Black Mirror’s sixth season, turning it to a full pop jam13.

Last

released on Broken (Halo 5), September 22, 1992

As the story goes, Reznor's first label TVT did not like Pretty Hate Machine. From the moment that Reznor presented the album, rather than demos Purest Feeling, TVT declared it an abortion14. Pretty Hate Machine would go on to be the very opposite of that, but also meant the start of Reznor and TVT’s beef. Broken is the first of many fuck-yous to the label; produced by Flood and Reznor, forget synthpop, this is completely metal, most of it claustrophobic, violent, and vicious. Of this short, brief punch of an EP, Last doesn’t rush with the same speed as Wish does, nor does it bombard as much as Happiness in Slavery. Instead, the interplay of the guitar in the verse, the galloping pre-chorus and the instrumental before it goes to this isn’t meant to last over and over make it for the most accessible song of the release. Even at the weirdest (and this was far from the weirdest NIN would get), there is always something to hold onto when listening to a NIN record: in this case, a noticeable pop structure of verses, catchy choruses, and a bridge, always cleanly separated. Plus, Wish might have “fist fuck”, but Last features the lyrics my heart is a whore, which might as well be the Nine Inch Nails lyric considering past and future songs. The TVT partnership wasn’t meant to last (neither would be the Interscope deal that comes afterward, but that’s not in the 90s) and Last is one very nasty taunt.

Self Destruction, Part Two

released on Further Down The Spiral (Halo 10), June 1, 1995

The opener of NIN’s sophomore record The Downward Spiral starts off with a sample of the movie THX 1138, and with its lyrics describing a peculiar brain demon of the unnamed protagonist, Mr Self Destruct is manic and unhinged, a perfect introduction to The Downward Spiral: a far, far darker world than either Broken or Pretty Hate Machine. But J.G Thirlwell’s remix Self Destruction, Part Two off Further Down The Spiral takes the manic energy a step further. The song’s opening is now matched with clanking machines, a guitar that travels from one ear to the next, paired with a guttural wall of bass. An entire minute longer than the original, Self Destruction, Part Two adds an instrumental section that keeps the momentum going, blissfully eschews the extremes of quiet and loud of the original and adds the sample to the instrumental breaks rather than the start. In the meantime, all of the thrashing electric guitars, breakneck drums, and arresting vocal performance are there, and so is the whispered and I control you that haunts like an intrusive thought. If Mr Self Destruct is an introduction, Self Destruction, Part Two is a declaration of evil.

Dead Souls

released as soundtrack contribution to The Crow on March 29, 1994; re-released on The Downward Spiral’s deluxe edition (Halo 8 DE) on November 23, 2004

British group Joy Division, one of the formative names in the post punk movement, made music that both musically and lyrically sounded like the equivalent of a dark, dusty attic of a house on a busy street that never catches fresh air — case in point, one of their catchiest riffs has the vibe of an air siren blaring about15. The Atmosphere b-side Dead Souls would go on to live a second life some fourteen years after its release, and compared to the original, Reznor sounds quiet, as though he can tell there’s no someone in the first verse to help him, just himself. It makes the plea in the chorus — they keep calling me, keep on calling me — all the more desperate. The song is slower and the drums are mixed louder, less a whip crack of lightning compared to the original and more the ominous foreboding of thunder. Although soon Reznor approaches the usual loud territory in the chorus — leading to screams at the climax — it’s not quite the same as the frantic energy of anything else by Nine Inch Nails. Up until this point, an average Nine Inch Nails song either meant the protagonist faced their demons head on or the protagonist became the demon. If it wasn’t anger, it was about sex or the desire thereof. But Dead Souls is a song of somebody haunted, removed, with lyrics making copious usage of similes. It revels in its darkness and doesn’t immediately reject it; hard to do so when the darkness is a fog, rather than the sticky, wet mud of The Downward Spiral. And through it all, Reznor constructs his very own dusty attic.

Ten Miles High

released on: 1) The Fragile (Halo 14) vinyl, September 21th, 1999; 2) Things Falling Apart (Halo 16), November 21, 2000; 3) as instrumental version on The Fragile: Deviations 1 (Halo 30), December 23, 2016

One of the most rewarding aspects of Nine Inch Nails is their extensive vault. Almost every song by Nine Inch Nails is available on streaming services sans Deep16, The Fragile b-side The New Flesh, and archival release The Fragile Deviations 1. One song besides The Downward Spiral that features so many versions is 10 Miles High. In the creation of the CD versions, the song was cut out of the original tracklist of The Fragile, but then appeared as an “alternate” tracklist on the vinyl version17, thus extending the outro of The Mark Has Been Made and keeping the flawless transitions of the double album intact. The song later reappeared on Things Falling Apart18 as a remix, remaining the only version available on streaming platforms; and, finally, on Fragile: Deviations 1, in its instrumental version named Hello, Everything Is Not OK19. Both in the vinyl version that also appears in the 2017 Definitive Version of The Fragile and the remix, arpeggios and twinkling pianos tentatively open the song. Soon, they are broken by a jagged vocal declaring I’m getting closer / all the time. Guitars reminiscent of an alarm siren lend the song an overall urgency, a sped up exorcism or maybe the free fall to the deepest pits of hell. A futile attempt regardless: midway through a quiet guitar the song, buried deep in the mix on the right channel of stereo, we hear Reznor say: my nightmare’s everywhere but inside. Despite making it ten miles20 high, in the end, you can neither escape your lies nor yourself. The song arrives to the same conclusion, at least in the original, in which a warped oscillator is paired with a singular guitar in the bridge, and at the final twenty seconds, all instruments stop except for multiple Reznors chanting: tear it all down, tear it all down, tear it all— The remix version by Keith Hillebrandt keeps it largely similar to the original, except that the guitar of the bridge is moved towards the end, turning to a coda rather than a moment of quiet: game over. And still: tear it all down, tear it all down. The song is arena rock if the arena was the vast nothing of the deepest parts of the Reznor’s psyche and the rock was the only tool that worked against a mental demon.

Most of The Fragile doesn’t hide its bleak soundscape — least of all its second half, which details the descent back downward until the fittingly titled finish Ripe (With Decay) — but 10 Miles High marks the point where self-loathing turns from despair to aggression, followed by the eventual neediness (Please) and arrogance (Starfuckers, Inc.). It’s not the bleakest song on the record, but one of its hardest. Reznor said that 10 Miles High had three different sets of lyrics and choruses. Perhaps straightforward arena rock was the goal for Hello, Everything is Not OK, the instrumental of which made it on the aforementioned Deviations and The Fragile (Instrumentals and Outtakes), only available on Apple Music. The guitar that only appeared on the bridge (or the ending, depending) now makes up the entire verse. Audience cheers and chants of ho! ho! are added to the mix. As the drum comes to a skittering halt, indeterminate voices ask questions, overlap one another, until finally, the drumstick drops to the ground. Real life turned hell, or hell turned to real life? The nightmare is everywhere but inside. And with each listen, on each version, the aggression, the haughtiness all follow the nightmare, and the final realization returns with renewed vigor.

“Sin” & “Reptile”

as performed on Woodstock, August 13, 1994, and released on And All That Could Have Been (Halo 17), January 22, 2002

Sin, a b-side of Pretty Hate Machine, is a synthpop song with teeth. In its original, the sampled “sha” (likely from Paid in Full by Erik B & Rakim) give the song an itchy feel, while drums rattle as if chained. The original song is spirited, but same thing can be said about all the Pretty Hate Machine songs, plus Sin ends up sandwiched between two superior songs21. In the live version of Sin, though, the drums are finally freed, and there’s guitars in the mix and the keyboard notes at the start lend the song a jungle-like feel. Reznor’s gnarl here sounds far better live than the first-take feel of the studio recording. The bridge is undescored by loud “arghs!” and, in the Woodstock performance, ends with a “WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKERS!”22 Of note is the quote taken from Clive Barker’s short story “In the Hills, the Cities”, in which a gay man becomes part of a giant human construct after said human construct kills his lover23: the “stale incense, old sweat, and lies” that originally meant to describe the church becomes the anger hurled at the lover, possibly something sado-masochistic even. The lover ruined something irreplaceable in the protagonist’s mind, but are the only one that can take in “the extent of my sin” (Sound familiar?) — this is pure aggression and a highlight live.

Similar things can be said of Reptile. Where in Closer and Sin, sex is the catharsis, in Reptile the inverse happens. Featuring lyrics that just about drip with condescension with whoever this woman is, a strange fax machine running in the production over and over, and a soundscape utterly dark and mechanical, the studio version is one of the bleakest spots of the record and a signal to the end that is to come. It’s a very intense moment in the album already, but the live version of And All That Could Have Been turns it up a notch, with the mixing of the instruments pressing on the ears to the sides, rather than a spread-out, industral world that smells in the album. The guitars and drums sound so unbelievably gnarly live, and Reznor provides some excellent vocals both in chorus and the adlibs throughout. Whether you enjoy Reptile in album format more or live (it consistently ranks high in top 20 offerings), the entrancing song with its depersonalized, absolutely objectified is brilliant in the same way watching a pimple pop: suddenly the pus is all there, yellow-white and utterly gross, but coming from you.

When Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly came onto the Nine Inch Nails episode of podcast Bandsplain24, he recalled how big a fan of Nine Inch Nails he is and was in his youth; his memorabilia includes various piano keys and guitar strands that Trent Reznor, at some point in the show, has destroyed. "It was just one of those shows,” Reznor told NME Magazine in 199125 when asked about the smashed guitars. This was at the very first Lollapalooza. Three years later, the legendary Woodstock ‘94 performance features the whole band in mud, various mic stands hurled at an equally mud-caked group of fans, mics tossed aside with reckless abandon, and closer Head Like A Hole ends with Reznor throwing the entire guitar to the crowd. A lot of those shows! NIN as a live band is an interesting case — besides the damages on instrument and equipment, and numerous letters and even poems by fans26, Reznor would handpick members per tour and really wasn’t a fan of touring. More importantly, though, Nine Inch Nails wasn’t an analogue band. NIN was a project that started out on a studio, very much sounded like it, and would go on to sound even more digital, which reflected on the songs. But it didn’t mean they had to lose their visceral feeling live. Of the albums available on streaming, there’s the aforementioned Woodstock performance27 and And All That Could Have Been, taken from the Fragility v2.0 tour (promoting The Fragile between April - June 2000). At their best, the live recordings are kinetic and ear-filling in a way the originals are not.

And All That Could Have Been

released on the And All That Could Have Been (Halo 17) companion EP Still, January 22, 2002

When Nine Inch Nails wasn’t angry, horny, hurt, or a permutation thereof, the project was often sad. While Something I Can Never Have is the prototype to a lot of sad NIN songs to come — songs that were open, personal, and intensely vulnerable — and Hurt got immortalized by Johnny Cash, And All That Could Have Been feels somehow more devastating. It’s the chorus that stomps in its quiet way, the vocal performance that sounds so utterly defeated, and the way the guitar comes crashing in, midway through the song, that envelops both earbuds. If it sounds shoegaze-esque, it might be because mixer Alan Moulder has also been responsible for mixing My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. The long, instrumental break is no longer the attic of Dead Souls and not the myopic worldview that both The Fragile and Pretty Hate Machine offered — it’s the free fall to a long abyss. When Reznor sings Gone, fading, it sounds like it. It feels like it. The Fragile, the outtake of which is And All That Could Have Been, marked the lowest point in Reznor’s life, marred by the loss of his grandmother and drug abuse, a time ruled by fear and addiction28. By the time this song was released in 2002, Reznor was in rehab. The goal was to figure himself out.

Now is perhaps a good time to mention that Nine Inch Nails is actually a very online band29. Besides having an official Discord on which both Reznor and Atticus Ross (the other official member of Nine Inch Nails since 2016) are active, fans had the chance to remix 2005 single Only online30; the rollout of fifth album Year Zero included USB sticks that were strewn around the bathrooms during band shows31, as well as a game; Ghosts I-IV was released as torrents on ThePirateBay; inspired by Radiohead, Saul Williams’ The Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, for which Reznor produced, featured a pay-what-you-can system with a minimum fee of $5 on the Nine Inch Nails website. Trent Reznor was also on various forums32, replying to fans in a dry, slightly sarcastic manner. Web 2.0 was a time where the Internet didn’t feel like five websites and a never-ending sludge of “the algorithm”, but a place of genuine possibility. As we head into the second and third decades of Nine Inch Nails with a sober Reznor, the idea of possibility comes forward not only in promotion, but also in the music.

Sunspots

released on With Teeth (Halo 19) May 3, 2005

Thus far, when a woman was involved in the lyrics, she’s either a whore, somebody who hurt Reznor, or the one who will save him. It doesn’t have to be sex — The Fragile’s title track details a female character that shines so brightly that he has to protect her despite his own status, and on La Mer, a female vocal speaks in Creole French over a Debussy-inspired piano about nothing stopping her now. Still, the evidence could make one say that Reznor is a misogynist, which, even in the ‘90s, Reznor has vehemently refuted33. Though NIN has plenty romantic songs and lines (Something I Can Never Have, We’re In This Together), Sunspots boasts a killer bassline, a chorus that recalls To Here Knows When34 (once again, the Alan Moulder production credit pops up) and lyrics straight out of the textbook of both Alex Kapranos35 and Alex Turner. Reznor has often been magnetic in his songs, but it was due to his unguarded, visceral emotions, the immediacy of his delivery. Here, on a song that's mostly about the mortifying ordeal of being self-aware, he's something else: charismatic. She’s not here to save him from whatever he’s going through. She’s here, she is hot, and he’s sorry for what he’s going through. He’ll be with her for a moment; right now, it’s time to stare at the sun, and thus, turn a blind eye to himself and his past. We’re gonna burn what we were left of the ground / Fuck in the fire and we’ll spread the ashes around to a vocal and bassline like this makes both fire and the ashes quite enticing.

Lights In The Sky

released on The Slip (Halo 27), May 5, 2008

Year Zero and The Slip were created with specific constraints: Year Zero was created during the Live: With Teeth tour, while The Slip was created with the goal of finishing a song the day it started36. The results are often compelling, but not perfected, so it comes as no surprise neither record ranks high with fans. Of these two records, major highlight Lights in the Sky employs a piano with a reverb and a serious sense of doom. Following a she that is “mostly gone,” likely in the process of dying, Reznor’s vocal performance is tender and reverent, as he promises to keep by her side as the lights in the sky have arrived. It serves as a stark contrast to the electronic soundscape of either record. There is no dramatic chorus here, no wild changes, only a sober goodbye. As Lights in the Sky segue to the instrumental Corona Radiata, a seven-minute long ambient eulogy, it feels like a very private moment the listener is privy to and becomes one with.

Copy of A

released on Hesitation Marks (Halo 28), August 30, 2013

Over the years, Nine Inch Nails’ songs got parodied and referenced by figures as varied as Weird Al Yankovic and Kermit the Frog, but perhaps none of them come as close as THIS IS A TRENT REZNOR SONG, on which Freddy Scott references Closer, The Hand That Feeds, and We’re In This Together’s music videos and lays down the basic structure of a Trent Reznor song: verse with lower-register vocals, weird guitars, odd percussions, a singalong chorus that is usually noisy, a second verse that has Reznor sing louder, chorus again and a piano as a finish so it sounds like a haunted house. “It’s still going on / But it’s very awesome,” goes the chorus. Of course, the gag here is that the song is not original, but from Copy Of A, making the affair both slyly meta (title aside, the original lyrics feature the lyrics “Everything I’ve said, I’ve said before”) and utterly fanboyish. It’s an excellent choice: Copy Of A is an archetypical Nine Inch Nails song if it was frozen solid at 0 Kelvin37, spellbinding with its repetitive words and quasi-dance vibe.

The Background World

released on Add Violence (Halo 31), July 21, 2017

This far into anyone’s career — in Nine Inch Nails’ case, closing in to 30 years by the time The Trilogy started — the act either becomes a thing of legacy, crystallize to the same old tricks, or pivot someplace new. Lyrically speaking, besides Year Zero, Reznor only ever spoke of one perspective: himself. This time, the paranoia of earlier records was paired with the bleak, post-apocalyptic world sketched in Year Zero, introducing the world of The Trilogy: a simulation in which the protagonist realizes that humans are just microbes in a jar38. The clearest picture of this vision is the closer of middle EP Add Violence, an eleven-minute long song both dark and claustrophobic throughout its vocalized parts. Just when you think you know where this goes — be it in the piano chords, the way the synths stack up, the guitars in the mix, or the subdued vocals — The Background World goes a step further and loops the same eight bars over and over, adding a single beat of a break before it iterates once more, slightly more distorted. If The Downward Spiral cast the inner world of the protagonist as something made of metal, rust, dirt, and wires, then The Background World zooms out to reveal everything is made of that material. Pretty Hate Machine sounds positively juvenile compared to this song, The Fragile almost too short in its attempt to visualize a decaying world. Year Zero toyed with the aftermath of an apocalypse: The Background World is the apocalypse. The protagonist realizes that the world is a simulation, that there is no time moving forward or backward, just an endless slog of now. Are you sure, Trent Reznor sings, before another vocal adds, at the far back, this is what you want? It is utterly terrifying. There is no sexiness here, no prettiness; this is the hypnosis of watching a car break down, over and over, and pixelate into nothing. The Trilogy marks a rejuvenated Nine Inch Nails and The Background World is the new ace up their sleeve. This is no legacy act in any way.

The NIN catalogue can be daunting, and as much as my aim for this post was to sample, in the end, a starting point needs to be made. The chronological approach, in NIN’s case, can be incredibly rewarding — musical ideas get picked up again and refined to exhilarating new songs, as Ten Miles High proves — but if a 1989 synth-pop album does not grab your attention, perhaps The Trilogy will. Clocking in at a slim twenty-one minutes, the first EP Not The Actual Events is an excellent amalgamation of the industrial, abrasive sound that NIN made their name with, as well as the pitch-black dancefloor beats that earned them the pop label since the inception of the project39, and chock full of musical ideas. Add Violence is a little more analogue, but just as bristling. Bad Witch, the conclusion, adds saxophone to the mix, lets go of lyrics altogether at points, and seamlessly blends together to a meticulous musical experiment. If twenty-one minutes to half an hour is too long still, Closer, as mentioned, is the one song you need to have heard of (and seen! The music video is a marvel and cuts the song to an acceptable four minutes). After The Trilogy, though, the path returns back to the start: Pretty Hate Machine.

There is also an alternative path that one could attempt, one that doesn’t begin with the Nine Inch Nails moniker at all. It could, possibly, begin with the director David Fincher: be it 2010’s The Social Network, 2011’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, or the 2014 gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss progenitor Gone Girl. Hell, it might even involve 2020’s Mank, if you want to be in for a surprise. And then, eventually, you reach Soul, the Pixar film involving a Jazz musician who dies and has to go back to Earth. There’s an interesting sound there, if you listen to the afterlife scenes; this is pretty piano music, but does not resemble jazz. In fact, it’s almost too pristine…

The next Potpourri contains ghosts, How To Destroy Angels, production credits, and Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. It is out sometime October. twitter | retrospring | ko-fi

Subscribe now