Song Review: Heart Of Woman – Melt

Rookies Heart Of Woman are gearing up for their first comeback early next month, but have dropped a surprise pre-release today. Their first album was a stuffed project that spawned several promoted tracks, though it came across as quite scattershot sonically. I’d love to hear them develop a strong, signature sound going forward, but a track like Melt is not the song to do that. It feels like an A2O-shaped meteor has landed in K-pop this month, shifting musical trends away from the soft, shuffling pop that has dominated the industry for years now. The way K-pop works, we’ll likely need to wait a few months to see if these trends truly become inescapable, which in the meantime leaves us with a bunch of “new” music that now exists in an expired paradigm. This presents a problem for a song like Melt. A year or two ago, its subdued, amorphous sound would fit right in with many of Heart Of Woman’s peers. Today, it already sounds outdated and generic. The song itself doesn’t do much to fight for its place, unveiling a very forgettable series of melodies over an extremely short runtime. The song wafts here and there without much intention, sprinkling a familiar, dreamlike mood that can alr...