UK Garage’s Life in K-Pop, from “View” to “Ditto”
A short retrospective on a subgenre that stuck around since 2015
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.
