Girls

An appreciation for all of the random words in their music - Part 2: Black mamba, hoot, Reunite, Beat It yeah, Meta universe, parallel world, Algorithm, REKALL, SYNK DIVE, FLAT, buzz word, lingo

2021’s ‘Savage’ was perhaps one of the best kpop mini albums I have heard in a long time, so you can imagine that I was probably very excited for the 4 piece cyberpunk group aespa to return with their second mini album ‘Girls’. Unfortunately, however, I cannot say it lived up to the hype, though it isn't necessarily bad.

Title track ‘Girls’ is a mysterious and aggressive sounding single. The instrumental sounds to me like something that could definitely be part of an action movie soundtrack. The guitar in the prechorus is soooooo good and definitely reminiscent of TVXQ. The chorus is okay but for once I think they kind of… overused harmonies in a way. The issue is here that not many of the melodies on this song stand out to me at all - and some [arts of the song often feel like they have random awkward pauses. The dance break is very cool instrumentally, very 2000s electronic music! ‘Girls’ definitely isn’t bad but I was hoping for something more campy and abstract like ‘Next Level’ and ‘Savage’, though it is true that they can’t just do the same thing over and over again. Next is the prerelease single ‘Illusion’ which is SUCH a banger. I don’t even care about cringy lyrics like “you’re so yummy yummy yummy in my tummy”, any song with a prechorus like that can do anything and I would forgive it. I love the digitised synth stabs and the vocoder on the vocals, as well as how their higher harmonies layer on top of the vocoder parts towards the end. At this point in the mini album I was extremely excited to hear the rest of the mini album… little did I know how badly it would fall off after the first two tracks…

So after giving us a bit of 2000’s electronic, rock and hyperpop combined - SM entertainment decides it’s a good idea to abruptly switch to COUNTRY music on ‘Lingo’. Absolutely not something I wanted to hear from aespa. The worst part is I can 100% see how they tried to make this fit their style but it just… didn’t work. The chorus is very flat and boring to me and I cannot. ‘Life’s Too Short’ is… a song I could rant about for a long time, but I’ll keep it short. This song was revealed when they performed it live to the crowd at their Coachella set. It kind of feels like a Bebe Rexha song, and that is absolutely not a compliment. I will say that the Korean version is a lot more bearable than the English version - which was so abominable with the “haters can’t tear me down” type of lyrics…. You are AESPA, not ITZY - you should be singing about how the Black Mamba hacked naevis’ dataframe in the hallucination quest, not about your haters! A mid track, but it has grown on me a bit. Finally we end the mini album with ‘ICU’ which is just some little Disney coming of age movie song that the main character would sing when contemplating leaving her friends in Kentucky to pursue her dreams of studying marine biology in New York! It’s definitely cute, though the melodies are nothing to write home about really.

‘Girls’ is kind of just a release… that happened, I guess. It’s definitely a downgrade musically, but it has at least 2.5 good songs! I don’t want to pigeonhole aespa into one sound, they’re free to explore any sounds and genres they want to - but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna like them, and that is fine!

Favourite tracks: ‘Girls’, ‘Illusion’
Least favourite: ‘Lingo’