Kpopalypse roundup – new k-pop releases 10/3/2025
It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Jennie – Like Jennie
You know how sometimes you buy a k-pop album and the first intro track goes HARD with the beats but is also way too short, underdeveloped and weakly written, but you think to yourself “if they keep that kind of sound up for the entire album and apply it to some better material I’m sure they’ll get it right somewhere in here” and then the entire rest of the album just ends up being mid-tempo singles and lame ballads? Jennie decided to actually release that first song as a feature instead of leaving it on the album like every other k-pop artist does, and the result is as “promising yet underwhelming” as these things always are.
j-hope feat. Miguel – Sweet Dreams
I had a sweet dream when I dreamed of a world without limp BTS solo songs featuring unnecessary guest artists tagging along for the ride. Then I woke up and had to write roundup. What a drag.
Seulgi – Baby, Not Baby
Why Red Velvet as a full group never gets songs this straightforward and good I don’t know, even when Red Velvet ARE good it’s always good in a “teetering on the brink of total catastrophic failure but somehow they pulled it off” kind of way. Seulgi leans into about three different eras of Britney Spears for this one and the result just works because it doesn’t try to go too far off base like… you know, the usual.
Yeji – Air
Yeji’s song is also pretty good. We’re in the era of decent female solos, people.
Yves – See you in hell
I was hoping for a hat trick this week but no. She means “ballad hell” I guess.
INFINITE – Dangerous
Infinite will probably never get back to the glory days of “The Chaser” musically, but goddamn they sure did the next best thing and pulled out the heavy fanservice for this one, they’re really going for those Kpopalypse Objectification Survey 2025 placings. I think they know exactly what they’re doing at 0:17 – you’re welcome, gay readers.
TREASURE – Yellow
When the new Kpopalypse book comes out later this year it’s going to go pretty deep on the relationships between school friends when fame becomes involved. I’ll bookmark this video here just so I can refer back to it for examples of how not to tackle the topic.
Hearts2Hearts – Butterflies
Okay I think Hearts2Hearts have shedded the NewJeans-lite tag, because this is giving less “H2H cloning NJZ cloning SES” and more just “H2H cloning SES”, which kind of puts them in line with some of Red Velvet’s shithouse early songs where they were either covering SES songs outright, or digging up songs in the SES vault that were never released and sloppily reheating them.
Alexa – Sugarcoat
Alexa is really happy to not be on her old label, but they still want to make a buck off her so they’re now popping out all the old stuff of hers they didn’t release to try and desperately scrape together some ROI. I’m happy too, because as a fully independent artist she might get to work in the future with a video director who can teach her how to hold a Shure Super 55 microphone properly instead of pointing it off to the side like she does in this video.
We;Na – Wake Up
She could take some lessons from We:Na who actually get the microphone use right here, and the song’s decent too! Incredible Kpopalypse influence! What’s next, agencies not torturing their artists with extreme dieting and long work hours?
ONEWE – The Starry Night
Hey this rock song isn’t too bad either, it’s not earth-shattering but it’s certainly listenable and a bit above the average. In fact it’s similar in quality to another song also called “Starry Night” by a group called Fifty Fifty, maybe you’ve heard of them. I wonder how those girls are going, I hope all’s well in their world. Be sure to support them, won’t you.
BTOB – Love Today
Unless you have a flannel pyjamas fetish like some of the fans of Caitlin’s stream, this new track from BTOB isn’t for you. They need to learn from what Infinite are doing.
Xiumin – WHEEE!
Nothing worth starting a lawsuit over.
Hoshi x Woozi (Seventeen) – Same Age
Okay so they used that melody that’s in that Red Light Green Light song on Squid Game and I thought the use of that song in the TV series was that it was supposed to sound juvenile and annoying, not something that someone would actually make a pop song out of. Oh well, people will listen to anything if their bias is in it I guess. I know it’s true because I watched that new mid XG song about 5 times just to see ten seconds of Cocona. Can’t point fingers I suppose.
NewKids – Balla
You know that the boys were 100% in charge of this production, because it says so in serious looking black and white text at the start of the video, and serious-looking black and white text at the start of videos never lies. You could put leaked Burning Sun videos on the Internet and stick a “nobody was harmed in the making of this video” message at the front in serious black and white text and k-pop fans would cape for the harmlessness of the video to the hills.
OEN HIGH – Finish Line〜 Last Race, New Start
HYBE something something competition Japan something. It doesn’t sound awful but I just don’t think I give a fuck.
GENBLUE – Act Like That
A Taiwanese group tries their hand at being a k-pop XG style, the results aren’t too bad but my bias in this group is definitely that bubbly keyboard arpeggio and nothing else about the entire package.
XG – Is This Love
Meanwhile actual XG’s new track is fairly middling. XG are a rare case in k-pop where the singing sounds cringe but the rap doesn’t, usually it’s the other way around. They’re not at their best on tracks like this where they’re relying mainly on their songwriters’ weak vocal writing style.
8TURN – Leggo
K-pop group missing? If only.
NEWBEAT – Jello
Wait, breakbeats are coming back in k-pop? Okay, here’s a trend I can get behind. I’ll have to wait a little more for someone to pair it with a decent song, but there’s hope.
NTX – Over N Over
Yeah they really are coming back. This song has sampled beats in it that I haven’t heard in pop music for about 35 years.
Baekhyun, UMI, EL CAPITXN – Do What You Do
I was really tired when I loaded this up for the first time, and for some reason I misread EX CAPITXN as Eric Clapton and nearly had a heart attack. K-pop really will be dead the day that racist tinfoil-hat loser with his shit blues scales gets involved. Thankfully he’s not in this track which is just another generic shitful ballad like all the other ones you all hate.
Starrywave – Wishline
Starrywave are just good, and this rocks like a lot of your j-rock faves. I feel like they could have gone deeper with the instrumental here and integrated the lead guitars into more than just the solo break, but it’s still great and maybe stuff like this will wake Dreamcatcher up from their soft-rock slumber and show them it’s okay to turn up the volume a bit.
Yaeji feat. E Wata – Pondeggi
Every Yaegi song is exactly the same. Some crazy idea that could have worked well if only anyone had a fucking clue about songwriting.
Kim Bora – Fly Away
Cherry Bullet is over so now their members all graduate to ballad hell (you know, the one Yves was singing about this week).
Yona – P.I.N.K (Piece I Never Knew)
I’m not quite sure if Yona is fully aware how “Piece I Never Knew” sounds as a phrase but whatever, the song’s not bad I guess even if the video has to have the fucking sportball in it (puke)
Yu Soohyun – Thrilled
This week’s trot performer you’ve never heard of is doing strict trot-by-numbers, the most interesting thing about this video is the white-painted ceiling with cracks in it, let’s hope she doesn’t die in a collapsing-building accident.
Ichiyu – Summer Shadow
This song wasn’t good enough to praise, bad enough to shit on or interesting enough to save for Nugu Alert, so instead let’s put our weekly non-Korean LGBT feature here instead, yay! This week it’s The Dicks, a band who were one of the first to bring open queerness to the 1980s US hardcore punk scene. Many groups in that scene did have LGBT members but they largely kept in the closet out of fear of being gay-bashed and that’s understandable because at the time that scene was all about macho bullshit. The Dicks on the other hand had an openly gay singer who was physically huge, dressed in women’s underwear and absolutely terrified the shit out of absolutely everyone, if anyone was handing out the beat-downs at shows it was him. Their best song is definitely “Dicks Hate The Police”, but also check out “Saturday Night At The Bookstore” for a deep dive into Texas LGBT culture.
Replica Dream – Naphthalene
I don’t know what Naphthalene is, maybe it’s a kind of sedative drug that you take that turns you into a fucking zombie and makes you appreciate music like this.
BILL STAX – Weirdo
There’s a whole bunch of stuff I could cover this week but I’ll leave you with this. I mean it’s poop but I liked the song title because people have been calling me weird every since I was knee high like it’s an insult, but it so isn’t. Like, no shit, I’m not like you cunts and thank fuck for that. But wait…
WE’RE HAVING LINEUP PROBLEMS IN KOREA SECTION
W24 – Seize The Day
How come nobody wants to play bass in Korea? Half the videos with rock groups in them, I can hear a bass guitarist but I can’t see them. As someone in their 15th year of a relationship with a girl who first saw me onstage before we even met, I’m here to tell you: playing bass gets you laid. Don’t be afraid of the bass now, kids.
The Redemptions – Be Numb Freak
And again. What the fuck? Fucking Korea what fuck cunt shit fuck ass cunt I will fly to Korea and shove tuning pegs up Lee Soo-Man’s ass until they learn about BASS
(Lissa if you put this review on TikTok please don’t put the context of the previous review with it, I love watching the dumb waste-of-space cunts in TikTok comments sections be confused because they couldn’t be bothered going to the website to get the context cheers)
Inaekkum – Noise
I was releived when I saw that this band have a bass player, until I realised they have no drummer! They even have the drumkit in the video but nobody to play it! Holy fuck just fly me over, I’ll do the drums for you, there’s nothing in this song that my basic drumming skills couldn’t work their way around.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
K-echo – why do kpop idols hiding their real voices?
It’s a valid question, but guess what. I’ve met several women over the last couple of decades in the western music business, great singers, great voices, great songwriters too – and they can’t get signed anywhere or get on big productions because the labels want “high sweet girly voice” and they have brassy gutsy voices and a lower vocal range. It’s not just Korea.
IVE Rei meets Chef Rush
I’m pretty sure his bicep is thicker than her waist. Anyway it’s good to know that Rei approves of objectification, what with her flesh-touching requests and comparing observations, that’s what we want to see here at Kpopalypse.com – we support Rei’s groping of the man-meat.
Isak & Jiyeon – One
Take it away song submitter: “isak n jiyeon were a sm duo that only released one album before they offically disbanded two years later and jiyeon is lina aka one of the members of cjsh the grace if it wasn’t obvious enough that they were basically a cjsh the grace draft“. Of course it’s incredibly weak, and not just because it has CSJH members in it – it’s not even competent on a basic technical level. The recent remastering of this song wasn’t able to fix the poor production that was standard for SM at the time and which results in one of the girl’s voices getting seriously audio-masked during the rap parts.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
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