Kpopalypse roundup – new k-pop releases 28/4/2025

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!

The problem with having a generic-ass rapper name is that someone else might have the same generic-ass name and accidentally hijack your YouTube channel. That’s got to be more upsetting than a day at the Holocaust museum, right RM?

G-Dragon feat. Taeyang, Daesung, CL, Im Siwan, Kwanghee, SEVENTEEN BSS, DAY6, Aespa, Jung Hyung Don, Jung Hae In, Lee Soo Hyuk, Hwang Jung Min, Kim Go Eun, Kian84, CODE KUNST, Defconn, Hong Jin Kyung, Ahn Sung Jae – Good Day 2025

Some garbage remake of some old song, that G-Dragon organised apparently. Sounds like ass so I don’t care. “Does he even like anything”, well not this fucking shit that’s for sure.

Jennie – Seoul City

What the fuck is this, seriously. Nothing here of note except Jennie swanning around looking bored and blurry.

Lisa – Rapunzel

Lisa’s song isn’t up to much either but at least it somewhat resembles a song and they remembered to wipe the camera lens down before filming.

MEOVV – Hands Up

Starts off crap but actually evolves into some interesting territory. It ends up being one of this week’s better songs, but I think that just says more about how shit this week is than anything to do with this song in particular.

Jannabi feat. Karina – May the TENDERNESS be with you!

A pretty… kind of bland song, livened up by a Brian May style guitar solo and little else. Sadly they couldn’t afford Karina’s appearance fee, guess she was busy lugging bits of Taeyeon’s stage down at the docks.

Kiiikiii – Groundwork

I guess IVE have “actual good music” on lock over at Starship at the moment so the agency’s new group has to do something as unlike that as possible to stand out. Makes sense, right?

TripleS – Black Soul Dress

A song as faceless and indistinct as my memory when I try and figure out who is who in this group.

Ablume – Never Far Away

Fiftyone Fiftyone are here with their debut song and… it’s really pretty bland, absolutely not debut material. Nice greenhouse video though although I’ve seen that done better too.

A20 MAY – Boss

According to my song submitter “A20 is a new agency made by the former SM CEO Lee Sooman” but don’t tell these girls who insist that they’re “the boss” instead. I guess one day they’ll find out the truth, probably when one of them wants to start their own fashion label.

Jiyoon – Yellow Light (Ray Remix)

Somehow, this thudding dance remix of Jiyoon’s brazenly awkward “Yellow Light” works about ten times better than the original. They made it all fit together, somehow. Jiyoon herself also looks like she’s actually having fun here, way more in her element when she’s not hamstrung by awkward choreo and can just jump around freely like a loon. I’m so happy for her that I nearly cried.

HIGHLIGHT – Chains

You can take the Highlight out of Beast, but you can’t take the beast out of Highlight…. wait, yes you can, they just did. Oh well. This song sucks so just a reminder that the survey results are now in – thanks for doing it, readers!

HITGS – Sourpatch

The implosion of NewJeans has just enboldened the “we have NewJeans at home” trend as every k-pop group new and old rushes with dollar signs in their eyes to generically fill the gap. This group don’t have any more chance than any of the others, so in other words, none at all.

VVS – Tea

An excellent video actually works reasonably well to distract from the shit song, making the whole thing very watchable even though the music sucks ass.

VVS – Facts

Yeah this is poo as well, but without the kickass video to make you forget the song exists. Kpopalypse doesn’t care about your feelings about “Facts”.

Burvey – Aeiou

Stay in school, kids.

Chen – Broken Party

I guess this particular species of butterfly can’t hear.

LOVEONE – Drama Queen

Nothing all that interesting happening here, although it does look like the Paradise Diner got a reupholster. I guess all those idol groups pretending to eat hamburgers finally wore out the chairs.

GENBLUE – OH!

Definitely one of the better songs this week, it’s still missing something in the melody writing to really shine, and the vocal processing is a bit on the nose, but given the gobsmacking shit that’s come out elsewhere this week I’m inclined to be forgiving.

NEXZ – O-RLY?

Rly average.

YOUNITE – Rock Steady

Not much in the way of steady rocking here, I’m afraid. There should be a law that any song with “rock” in the title at least has some live guitars and drums in it, then we can litigate shit like this out of existence.

Big Ocean – Attention

It tells me everything I need to know about k-pop in 2025 that a group of literal deaf people have songs that compete reasonably well with most of the big-name comebacks that get released in any given week lately.

P1Harmony – All You

This “for the fans” wank isn’t even worth the effort it takes to unzip my pants and piss on, so instead let’s have our weekly non-Korean LGBT feature here instead, yay! This week it’s Big Boys, a punk band from Texas who were great, from the same scene as The Dicks (previously covered in this feature) and just as gay. How gay exactly? Gay enough to piss off the notoriously homophobic Bad Brains, so in other words, gay enough to mrs for this feature.

TNX – Burst Up

Is it just me, or something about the colours, or is this gym so mega small that they’re almost hitting their heads on the ceiling every time they do a little foot bounce? K-pop gyms need minimum space OH&S requirements I think.

LUCY – Hippo

Lucy doesn’t quite get over the line with the song this time. It’s not bad but if you’re really going to do this soft rock pussy-out sound you’d better have a killer song or everyone is just going to whinge about there being not enough distortion.

OSDS – Bluetooth

Apparently Subin from Dal Shabet is in this group, I guess she didn’t get enough doomed-to-failure idol group shenanigans from the previous decade. Let’s cheer for her, even though we all know it won’t do any good.

SW:C – Candy House

This is really quite cringe and not very good but at least it isn’t “vroom vroom skkrt” or whatever.

ISEGYE IDOL – Misty Rainbow

A great way to make me lose interest in anything is pairing it with an anime video. Not that the song was that great anyway but the pressentation sure doesn’t help.

HONEYZ – HoneyHeart

Ugh, more anime treash just 3D this time. There has to be about 235986 pop groups in the world all called “Honeyz” with a Z just like that and none of them will ever see meaningful success because if you’re braindead enough to give a pop group a name as uninspired and lazy as “Honeyz” then you’re truly dumb as fuck and probably have no idea about songwriting or marketing either. It’s the same reason there will never be a successful metal group called “Vengeance” or a successful jazz group called “Cool Vibes”.

Kang Hyeyeon – I didn’t know too much

This is the girl from 2nd gen flop group BESTie, who reinvented herself as a trot singer a few years back. Sadly her latest song isn’t really that exciting, which sucks because I really liked her in BESTie and I wanted to support this, oh well.

Miss Kim – Doil Nom

This isn’t any better or worse. Trot in general is painfully generic, the reason why the few huge stars of trot are so huge is because eveyrone else just sounds like this.

Cho Hyunyoung – A Starry Night

The latest k-pop girl group member to be trapped in ballad hell is Rainbow’s Hyunyoung. Someone light a candle for her music career.

Leedo feat. YongYong – Sun goes down

That autotuned R&B trash that anyone with a brain, a soul, or any integrity hates with the passion of a thousand suns.

Han Seungwoo – Positive Vibes

I don’t give a fuck. Next.

Niel – She

Well, at least they made the Autotune subtle in this one.

Nam Taehyun – On the Edge of the Night

Is this that loser from South Club now trying to convince us that he has a sensitive side or something? K-pop boys are the limit.

Yoo Heedo – Nadu

I think it’s the shit ballads making love rarer.

The Deep – Angel Tattoo

Any track from The Deep these days is definitely a win for me, good or bad. If I like it, I get a good song and that’s great. On the other hand, if I don’t like it, I get to piss off her stupid fanbase who constantly bawl like babies on social media about how I’m the devil incarnate even when I’m giving The Deep extremely positive reviews just because I didn’t like some other track she made back two years ago that I’ve probably completely forgotten existed by now. K-pop fans of all artists have become a MAGA-style cult, and it’s sad that it’s gotten to this level even with small independent artists. This is not The Deep’s fault though, she just wants to make cool music and make money, can’t blame her for that. The fandom zombification is a cultural problem with fandoms globally, one that I’m trying to address… wish me luck, I’ll need it. In the meantime I’m not even giving my opinion on this song here just because I want to see what happens.

Glen Check – Good Times

Glen Check are one of those independent Korean bands spoken in revered tones and respected across the country but boy do they release some shit sometimes.

Gabby Omne – N!ke

There’s too much crap like this in roundup, isn’t there.

Cacophony – Cassette Tape

Cacophony are at their best when they’re not doing lame Beatles-ballad stuff like this.

Cotoba – Syhi

Cotoba are good but music videos don’t really capture why, I’d rather just watch live footage which is always better. This isn’t bad though.

Plane On Mars – Voyager 1

Elon Musk has kind of wrecked space-themed music for everyone, hasn’t he. I used to see “Mars” in a song title and think of David Bowie, now I just think about Elon pulling his ketamine-withered dick to old pictures of Grimes while lying about his computer game scores and failing to give his goddaughter Go Won her rightful inheritance or even buy Chuu a Tesla. Pathetic.

D.Ark & Paragons – Friday Night Mosh

Well this is hardly fucking Anthrax, is it. Let’s leave roundup here because I’m bored.

Rockit Girl – First Love

There’s always time for Rockit Girl though. Their latest soft-rock reinvention is better than expected, although I do miss the heaviness, which I’m sure they’ll get back to at some point. More importantly, Leeseul is looking better than ever.

RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

Sir_Atrocious – This is How K-Pop Labels Make Money

Um… no it isn’t, not quite. Mind you, this video is well-intentioned and has exactly the sort of conclusions that it would be perfectly reasonable for a k-pop fan to come to, if they had no industry knowledge. While the stuff here about manipulation etc. definitely isn’t a lie, the video omits such a huge chunk of the picture that I might do a video of my own as a way to update some of my old material (as veteran Kpopalypse readers will already know why this video misses the mark, so this is mainly for the benefit of newer readers). Expect it fondly.

MayTree – Doom (acapella)

Acapella music is honestly a gimmick that always gets boring once the “omg they’re doing it all with their mouths and a crapload of vocal processing” shock-and-awe dies down, so the best use of it is always gimmicky shit like this. It’s pretty cool actually, especially the sync up with the screen at the start and end. Someone should mod this into the actual game.

Nine Muses – Drama

The most relevant nine-member girl group in k-pop history sure had a good musical run after their shaky start (well-documented in “Nine Muses Of Star Empire“). I mean sure, there were only eight of them by this point, I guess one girl left to focus on her fashion label, it happens with groups like this. Pity that they never really made much bank but times are hard for the culturally relevant isn’t that right, Rachel and Mina…

That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!