Kpopalypse Nugu Alert Episode 90 – Rekirem, X Ara, Diva-X, Ucute
It’s time for another episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert! Let’s take a look at the last cropo of nugus for 2025!
At the moment I’m very busy getting a headstart on end of year content and trying to work out where I should put your k-pop faves on my best and worst lists for 2025. So it seems like a good time to clean up some nugu submissions that have been hanging around that may or may not be relevant to the lists or to any of you and… fuck it, nobody reads Nugu Alert. I can write anything here. Years ago I went to hospital for kidney stone and the other week I finally peed the stone out of my dick. The doctor said that would happen but I didn’t know it would take over five years for the stone to work its way down. I was wondering why fapping felt odd for a while, it was because there was one of Sorn’s “Sharp Objects” up there. If you’re wondering if it hurt, yes it did – stay hydrated, kids. Anyway enjoy these picks for the final Kpopalypse Nugu Alert of 2025!
Usual Kpopalypse Nugu Alert rules apply, artists must meet the following criteria:
- Less than 20,000 views across official channels
- Unlikely to be invited to Waterbomb even if they offered to do the event for free and wear even less than [insert your bias here]
- Relevant to Kpopalypse
Let’s take a look!
Rekirem – Access Completed
Let’s start of with this “live idol” thing, and Kpopalypse readers would do well to support the Korean live idol scene because it’s totally free from exploitation and all those bad k-idol things, unless you count what happened to Ihoteu which I’ll just totally ignore because it doesn’t suit my argument. Hey at least the agency lets the girls have their phones, even if using them seems to just make them pissed off. Rekirem doesn’t investigate that much in the way of production values with “Access Completed” sounding pretty rough around the edges, but maybe that’s a good thing because it’s supposed to be gritty and raw or something… no, actually it just sounds like ass. The song itself isn’t too bad though even if nobody knew how to record it, and the video is even almost pro looking in places. Worth a look.
YouTube views at the time of writing: 9863
Notable attribute: girl with the white tennis shoes from 3:44 is really letting the average footwear standards in this group slip
Nugu Alert Rating: high
X ARA – 1001001
You’ve heard of T-ara, well now it’s time for X-ara who don’t seem related at all although Qri probably has as many artificial bits in her these days as the girls in this video. I’m not sure whether this CGI monstrosity is all AI generated or what, but it’s possible that it at least partially isn’t, it actually has the look of some videos I’ve seen where different groups of university students handle different sections and then it’s all stitched together later, that would explain the odd visual switch-ups every minute or so. Anyway the song’s not half bad and even reminded me of Fiestar’s “Apple Pie” just a little, just try to ignore the various visual crimes this thing commits, like the ugly colours, the furry Marilyn Monroe skirt scene, and well pretty much all of the rest of it too.
YouTube views at the time of writing: 7890
Notable attribute: gosh Michael Jackson reimagined as an ape, I’m sure that won’t upset anyone in particular hey
Nugu Alert Rating: very high
DIVA-X – We Are Diva-X
Diva-X have been on Kpopalypse.com before, a while back I had a look at their fairly pointless cover of After School’s “Diva“, which they clearly chose to do a version of just because of the song name matching their group name. Judging by this neglectful dungeon-dance video, I guess their agency thought that the After School cover would be a better introduction of Diva-X to the world than their actual debut song, but I actually think the two songs are about equal in quality. If nothing else they both say “diva” about 239 times each, which gets about equally annoying as the songs progress, but they do lose Nugu points in this post for having a relatively popular cover. Worth nothing that the company gave such a small about of fucks about this song that they didn’t even get the girls to lipsync or include a proper audio track, so the version embedded on this website is my fixed version with the album audio, but you can check out the original video here if you want to help their viewcount and leave the girls encouraging and/or misleading comments about not giving up on their dreams.
YouTube views at the time of writing: 564
Notable attribute: bored staff member off to the left of the frame at the start of the video looks only at the piece of paper in his hand, not at the girls, I suspect he’s reading about all the money he blew on funding this debut in his quarterly profit and loss statement
Nugu Alert Rating: average
Ucute – Oppa Kimochi
Basically just a dance track with a girl making dental checkup noises over the top, there’s really not a lot to say about “Oppa Kimochi” musically other than it somehow manages to be a bop despite being basically nothing, which just goes to show that simplicity can really work well sometimes. The song reminded me of years ago when Boram/my mother told me of a song that she grew up with which was called “Mashed Potatoes Yeah” or something, and “mashed potatoes yeah” was supposedly the sum of the lyrics, but I think she’s misremembering because I can’t find such a song anywhere. It was probably actually The Mashed Potato Stomp which has a fair bit more lyrical variety than “Oppa Kimochi”. Anyway enjoy this song plus the animated video which has the Ucute girl street-harassing the guys for a change.
YouTube views at the time of writing: 281
Notable attribute: solid black bicycle basket at 0:18 changes to transparent net black bicycle basket at 0:20, human error or is AI gaslighting us nugu appreciators, you be the judge
Nugu Alert Rating: extreme
That’s all for this episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert – the series will return in 2026!
0 comments: