aespa’s “MY WORLD” Is An Excuse For the Servicably Bland
A review of the SM girlgroup's third mini album
When aespa debuted in November 2020, AI didn’t feel as big of a conversational point as it does now. Amidst executives earnestly discussing the possibility of AI writing shows when actual writers go on strike, chatbots seeming like they have (or training to have) a “human” side, AI music going viral, and AI-generated pictures — not to mention the trippy, absolutely unreal looking AI-generated commercials — where people gasp at how real it all looks, AI is wielded like a threat and a promise, depending on perspective. (Notion, the cloud application I write my essays on, hopped onto AI pretty hard, for instance1.) aespa themselves appeared on a United Nations conference to argue for “sustainable development” being necessary for the metaverse to thrive. The metaverse, of course, is much of what aespa’s identity hinges on: the place called “Kwangya” is a place of infinite possibility, with a black mamba threatening to collapse the perfect world created by naevis, if valiant warriors aespa (with their metaverse ae-vatar counterparts that hilariously look nothing like them) don’t come to the rescue — a plot that aespa helpfully summarized at their bid for the US charts with Girls last May (its EP debuting at #3 on the Billboard 200). But one of the more egregious examples of the company putting words into idols’ mouths in a while aside, broaching these topics don’t go well with their target audience, Generation Z: Sunmi, who joined an NFT project last year, has received much ire from her fans due to environmental concerns, as did aespa themselves when SM announced it. Perhaps SM Entertainment got cautious; there’s rumors that aespa’s comeback was delayed due to the title being about growing trees, and the announcement of naevis’s debut at SXSW this spring was also scrapped, though there was an aespa VR concert to be seen. In either case, the logline of Girls EP’s album cover, sung in the climax of the title, ends with a promise: eventually, aespa will probably meet naevis on the real “my world”. MY WORLD, their third EP, fulfills the promise. The title has a double meaning, even: MY is what their fans are called.
Pre-released Welcome to MY World, pairing gargantuan orchestral strings with cinematic electric guitars, actually features naevis (who sounds like a digitized mush of all four members). In the music video, the girls go out to a trip into the forest to find naevis… who is seen at the end when night has fallen, with a shimmer around her and the air around aespa, their world forever changed. Lead single Spicy’s music video, accordingly, features background pieces glitching in and out, and a helium balloon reading MYWORLD blowing itself up until the letters squish against themselves. But in the face of such strange phenomena, the girls themselves are concerned with other things: “Ideal type?” Giselle asks the interviewer in the opening video. Shrugging, Winter responds: “It’s nothing new.” We understand that Ningning, who laughingly asks her friend if she’s seen it, is referring to something else. They fall from the sky in a big pink car, girls concerned with girl things like strutting down the hallway, throwing parties in big mansions while everyone else is frozen, being a “ten out of ten, honest-ly”, as Giselle puts it so deliciously in the second verse: in fact, the falling car suggests that they are the strange phenomena, extraterrestrial Barbies too spicy for your heart. A flimsy connection to their world aside, they’re now in the same conversation that NewJeans (Attention, Hype Boy) and IVE (I Am) are also: a gang of girls who derive power from beauty products and riches. Just like them, Spicy is firmly entrenched in 2000s ideas — specifically the brattiness of Pussycat Dolls’s When I Grow Up, with the classic dash of SM songwriting giving it a hint of something early-day f(x) would do (specifically, Pinocchio). This is a far cry from the Rocket Puncher/Xenoglossy/Armamenter/Hacker quartet we’Ve last heard on Girls; this is the “real” world. Losing your lore so soon into your career is a distinctly SM thing (EXO and NCT 127 come to mind2), sure, but my problem with Spicy is wholly musical: a track entirely hinging on faux attitude and lots of chanting leads to the occasional jackpot — like the irresistible sugar rush of a post-chorus — but is the modus operandi for just about every girl group out right now, an unfortunate byproduct of ITZY’s first three singles and Blackpink’s major success looming large. Even the Y2K revival veneer of it can’t hide what is so evident with Spicy: it expiry date sometime 2019. Four years ago? Maybe, but that’s an entire pandemic ago. And despite the 2000s track used as a reference point, aespa’s 2000s feels like a pale imitation of SM’s 2000s, a fruitful decade with adventurous and melodic ideas3 (No. 1, Mirotic, Sorry Sorry, Gee to name a few).
But with SM, one can always count on solid B-sides: an understanding of the release as a full fledged product that, at their best, delivers a satisfying arc from the boisterous lead to more muted palettes. To MY WORLD’s credit, there’s an attempt here: Welcome to MY World is a stunning opener and ‘Til We Meet Again is a serviceable closer. That Welcome to MY World’s mood setting is quickly squashed by Spicy right after is just one unfortunate swerve here. Follow-up Salty & Sweet is the sister to Spicy in title and sound, even more tedious in its trap influences with a chorus that sounds like When I Grow Up’s chorus when they drag the final syllable to a higher key. In comparison, last year’s equally trap-influenced Illusion at least kept the electronic side intact and wasn’t this concerned with attitude. Is this really the problem, this sudden self-awareness, the confidence that even the real life world — my world, fine — is just as big a playground as Kwangya? Maybe. Thirsty — boasting by far the best track video, an hommage to 90s aesthetics and Friends — wowed me in the teaser, but the full version marks the second attempt by SM to redo Ariana Grande and Social House’s Boyfriend, a track that I don’t even think Ariana Grande thinks about this much. Unlike NCT 127’s First Kiss, this take is more forlorn, putting the emphasis on the yearning than the evident horniness (sip-sip-sipping all night), but despite cascading harmonies and twinkling piano takes a while to really worm its way to the ear. And try as I might, obligatory slow moment and closer ‘Til We Meet Again feels tedious to even press play to, though the girls sound quite good together with vocal harmonies that Red Velvet excel at. That being said, though, there’s I’m Unhappy. The initial teaser video didn’t sell me on the song: a take on Euphoria that was well-shot though didn’t seem to come to a conclusion. But, to be fair, a lack of conclusion works better in song than they do in videos. There’s a timidness to I’m Unhappy, a childlike melody revealing synthesized electric guitars in the bridge, like melancholia with the brightest Instagram filter imaginable slapped on top of it. And the girls bring a beautiful melancholy to it all: a real, human feeling of inferiority through social media algorithms. I’m especially taken with the defiance of the chorus: “This is like hell, yeah — I’m unhappy,” sings Ningning — but the way she squishes the hell yeah into the bar sounds as though she’s flaunting about how unhappy she is; a very Twitter sentiment to have. That there’s suddenly a swing back in the final chorus, them singing about being happy in the same tone as being unhappy, suggests that this is a neverending loop, and leaves the song at an uneasy place. In K-Pop’s world of easy gratification and even simpler answers, a song like this suggests actual depth and charters an interesting path forward for aespa: one where, possibly, Kwangya is an escape to the real world’s woes. But I don’t hold my breath that it will happen. It’ll be enough for a whole host of people to see aespa be rich girls, casually reference a variety of iconic movies, and have fun on the camera.
aespa is a group with music so good, so finished, so committed to its soundscape that it makes the rest of K-Pop seem behind and unfinished; more crucially, it makes one forget instantly that SM is using the group as a vehicle for their Metaverse ventures. 2021’s Savage, at its best — which it was very frequently — recalled f(x)’s penchant for electronic music with a 2020s polish and incredible vocal work. Kwangya sounded like it was made of live wires, motherboards, and neon lights that turned every surface to something exciting. Though the EP itself was just made up of previous singles and a clear ploy for the US market with serviceable but bland pop material, lead single Girls married the pop punk wave with an aspect of Y2K hitherto unexplored in K-Pop: nu-metal, and it proved a natural fit — “we owe her an apology” is a tweet that hits my timeline regularly with this song. But what makes MY WORLD so underwhelming is that aespa released a song on March 30 that proves they can still sound like they come from the future, a future where we all live in spaceships and the only sunlight to be had is fluorescent lights everywhere: Hold on Tight, that track for the movie Tetris, interpolated the Soviet melodies Korobeiniki and Kalinka — widely known as the Tetris melodies — and distills the initial promise of aespa into succinct three minutes. If SM is concerned about metaverse being touchy for Gen Z, Hold on Tight proves that you can sing about anything else and both keep core aesthetic and popular appeal intact — it has not left the Spotify Viral chart since its release. More importantly than popular appeal, though, is that MY WORLD is just fine, and with aespa, that means disappointing. Doing what everyone else does is sustainable development, sure, and MY WORLD expands their musical palette. But it’s nothing new.
This essay was not written with AI, please be serious.
Yes, Welcome to my World ties things together, but that’s (1) song and the rest isn’t. Spicy is still losing the core brand 2 years in. For completion’s sake: NCT 127’s was Touch. EXO’s was Growl.
Many of them produced by Yoo Youngjin. He was absent for this release, which I consider a massive detractor personally.