NewJeans’ “Get Up” Does Competently More of the Same

The ascendant girl group's new EP positions K-Pop back to the center, but leaves little room for personality or adventure. A review

If you’ve been into K-Pop for a year, you might have noticed something: that girl groups currently releasing are a certain kind of… indifferent. (There are outliers, of course.) The girls are sophisticated yet girlish, slightly introverted yet quietly assured, cool yet still approachable. They wear school uniforms or high-end brand Y2K gear that exposes the midriff and/or require safety shorts underneath. billlie, who had only last year gone off-the-walls electro pop, returned with a subdued, retro-tinged pop take with “EUNOIA”. A Pink, who had successfully pivoted from bubblegum pop to mature, dark synths, released the lead “D.N.D” of their tenth EP SELF that had the same idea. NMIXX, who were marketed to mixing a variety of genres (resulting in songs akin to highlight medleys), sounded surprisingly agreeable with their new leads “Roller Coaster” and “Party O’Clock”, both of those tracks utilizing UK Garage, school uniforms, and an understated vibe. (The best group riding this wave is undoubtedly fromis_9, who found their footing with their incredible full-length LP Unlock My World.)

Now, if one asks who even started the UK Garage trend of the early 2020s, the answer is quite simple: PinkPantheress. In K-Pop, her equivalent is ADOR girlgroup NewJeans. Within a year, they have taken K-pop and much of the internet by storm, starting with their suddenly-released debut single “Attention”, a track that Min Heejin — the creative director of NewJeans — held onto for at least two years. The “Attention” communicates an icy vibe without any of the usual sonic markers: no big synths, no flashy electronics. Instead, the chill comes from the “eh-eh” vocal loop and the quietly commanding presence of the members themselves, none of whom are big vocalists but can hold their own just fine and deliver tons of attitude as they look for attention. After that, a blitz of high-budget music videos and gargantuan choruses: “Hype Boy” (which I recently relistened to and was surprised to find out it had a second verse); “Hurt” (an R&B B-side that was musical wallpaper); “Cookie” (which is definitely not about sex, pinky-promise); “Ditto” (stacking hooks upon hooks and their first actual UK Garage track); and “OMG”, another track labelled as UK Garage although having more to do with Jersey club, that relies on its double whammy of incredibly sticky pre-chorus and chorus. There was the Coke Zero ad track (”Zero”). There was a feature on Jon Batiste’s new album. And now, with Get Up, the idea is to stake the claim as the leading girl group of their generation.

But, really, it’s more a victory lap, because not only is Get Up the exact same runtime as their debut EP (twelve minutes), much of Get Up also continues the UK Garage trend they started. Starting with “New Jeans”, a short opener, first single “SuperShy” continues the same vein of pretty, cutesy UK Garage. But right off the bat, the song makes it clear its only purpose is to keep you humming along the hook — either the “super shy, super shy” or “you don’t even know my name, do ya?”. So much of the short song cedes its time to the chorus. But the song is much too understated to just use the word “bludgeon” in relation to such tactic. It’s a gentle probing of matters, just making sure something sticks. Sure enough, the only part I remember of “SuperShy” are the hooks and the fact that one of the members raps. That, and the fact that none of these girls sound particularly super shy. It’s a feature, not a bug, but it’s a grating one nonetheless — there is simply no emotion sold here besides technical precision.

And then there’s “ETA”, the lead single of this EP, a song that wants to have its garage cake and eat… Pitbull-esque horns too? It’s meant to sound celebratory, but “what’s your E-T-A, what’s your E-T-A” is sung with a casual curiosity, not the fervent desire that asking someone to break up with their boyfriend needs (including but not limited to the line, “boys always be lying, yeah”). Nothing of the song gels, and all its elements are synthetically removed from one another to the degree one would call it a deconstruction of the genre, or at least a very satirical take of K-Pop altogether.

But that’s the sole genuine misfire of the whole EP. Get Up does more of what one has come to expect of NewJeans and has a competent hand at it. The name Erika de Casier immediately jumps out reading the credits, whose two albums Essentials and Sensational both tapped into 90s R&B and, in the case of latter, UK Garage and cutesy sing-talked raps. She has cowritten every track besides “Get Up” on here, and it gets obvious on the toplines. The highlight of these is “Cool With You”, a simple song of attraction and desire executed to success as the girls sing with wistfulness, as though they wished upon a star that their lover saw them the same way they did. The title track of Get Up does functionally the same as de Casier’s “Acceptance” interlude in her sophomore album. Then there’s “ASAP”, once again gently probing the listener with the “A-S-A-P baby” and “Hi, it’s me again, let’s talk — hey!” double-whammy as the ground under them shifts and warps quite a few times, from deep house that recalls early Yaeji to synths that are reminiscent of Eurodance. If the two hooks weren’t enough, the “tick-tock-tick-tock” intonation near the end will definitely worm its way to your ear. Unlike the horns of “ETA”, this one doesn’t grate and feels organic to the rest of the song.

It strikes me how the first EP tried to build the songs up, how the songs went over three minutes. “Ditto”, then, is not only instructive to most of K-Pop today, but to NewJeans themselves: hooks on hooks, leaving time for little else (literally — the longest song on this EP is 2:34 minutes “long”). These tracks seem uninterested in communicating a mood, nor interested in leaving a song as short as a thought like PinkPantheress, the progenitor, had done. I understand that my dismissal of hooks being catchy sounds strange and needlessly contrarian. After all, isn’t all pop simply interested in trying to get you as a listener sing along to its hooks? Isn’t all pop interested in taking the world by storm à la “Macarena”? And besides, that kind of thinking — this meaning-making of music designed to appeal to a broad, online audience— immediately makes one susceptible to cynicism that may appear when one isn’t exactly the target audience for NewJeans (say, a couple years older, or not wholly into Y2K aesthetics): that the whole music is a means to an end, which is launching the girls on every brand and every magazine cover possible, and being the moment for as long as K-Pop can allow.

I worry if that isn’t an unfair way to regard NewJeans — after all, one could boil down all of K-Pop to brand identity and product placement — but with so much of Get Up offering no new ideas, and even the Powerpuff Girls tie-in alongside (both the album cover and the music video to “New Jeans” are nods to the beloved property) it leaves me with no idea who NewJeans are beyond a narrowing musical scope sung by five pretty, vocally stable, extremely feminine girls. Do they have time to think about boys as much as they sing about them? I do have an idea of the creative director, though, and I do have an idea what she’s done with a group like f(x). Talking to Billboard, Min Heejin has spoken of releasing radically different music and visuals never seen in K-Pop before — which is what made f(x) pioneering — but NewJeans have yet to sound off-kilter. They sound agreeable. And besides, following global trends isn’t “radical”, it’s the fabric of K-Pop.

To be fair: what works, works. Within K-Pop, the reign of “girl crush” concepts and boisterous songs of the Blackpinks of the world was always bound to die, leaving space for cuter presentations. And outside of K-Pop, the genre finds itself back in the center of the conversation — critically and publicly — for the first time in a decade. In 2012, the sound was EDM, which is simultaneously the tonal opposite and the closest relative to UK Garage, and though Psy, Big Bang, and 2NE1 got the global credit and attention, it was a year in which everyone jumped onto autotune, wub-wub oontz-oontz sounds, and pushing the genre to the extreme it is known for today. NewJeans is the casual, chill equivalent of what happened a decade ago, and their music is never incompetent. But I’m missing a sense of adventure — musically, vocally, visually. In NewJeans pastel world, I yearn for a splash of neon, or a dash of the dark — anything that goes beyond the simple idea of hypnotizing the listener with a hook. I hear competency in “Cool With You”, and “ASAP” is full of ideas waiting to be fleshed out. But Get Up plays it safe, leaving “Ditto” a high watermark — a song that won not because it had the chorus it did, but because how well it communicated with emotion. Because any emotion is better than calculated indifference.