My favourite K-pop of 2016
Albums: (* indicates a mini album)
B.A.P, Noir
Crush, Interlude*
Tiffany, I Just Wanna Dance*
Day6, Daydream*
BTS, Wings
ELO, 8 Femmes*
Seventeen, Going Seventeen*
Yezi, Foresight Dream*
Jonghyun, 좋아
Hyuna, A'wesome*
BTOB, New Men*
100%, Time Leap*
Topp Dogg, First Street
GOT7, Flight Log: Turbulence
Cosmic Girls, Secret*
Pentagon, Five Senses*
MVs:
Sistar & Giorgio Moroder, “One More Day”
Ladies’ Code, “Galaxy”
Monsta X, “All In”
Stellar, “Sting”
Beenzino, “Life In Color”
Live, Sik-K, Punchnello, Owen Ovadoz, Flowsik, “Eung Freestyle”
Iron, “System”
Oh My Girl, “Windy Day”
BTS, “Blood Sweat & Tears”
Nam Woohyun, “Still I Remember”
25. Beenzino, “Life In Color” It turns out that being in love is a good look for Beenzino, and the zigzagging beat of “Life In Color” shows that if anything, his creativity has only increased since he’s settled down.
24. Day6, “Letting Go” I find Day6 charming because they remind me of the high school bands of my youth, who I’d see at school talent shows and nondescript downtown bars playing Red Hot Chili Peppers and John Mayer covers. Day6’s mini albums, last year’s The Day and this year’s Daydream, are full of the kinds of songs these high school bands might’ve covered in another universe, funk-inflected pop-rock so earnest that it swings back around to cool. (“Wish” is one of my favourite songs of the year.) “Letting Go” is last year’s vengeful “Congratulations” grown sadder and wiser. It’s a wave that gets bigger every time it breaks.
23. Nam Woohyun, “Still I Remember” I always say I hate ballads, but quietly, this became one of my most listened-to tracks of the year. The strings and brushed drums keep it moving, and contrary to my expectations, Woohyun’s falsetto lands as softly as snow.
22. NCT 127, “Fire Truck” Of all the year’s boy band singles with the “Turn Down For What” drop, this is my favourite, for the same reason that 127 is my favourite NCT unit so far: Between the extremes of NCT U’s dead-fish “The 7th Sense” and NCT Dream’s hyper-fluffy “Chewing Gum”, it hits the perfect balance of hard and fun.
21. Cosmic Girls, “Secret” I came to this one late, but it has the propulsion I was longing for in Stellar’s “Sting”, with the same perfect retro-pop form and a nicely squishy synth hook. The music video deserves the same level of thinking-face-emoji discourse that BTS’s “Blood Sweat & Tears” has been getting.
20. Mino, “Body” Song “apology to Korean gynaecologists” Minho releasing a full-length track on the topic of a woman’s body could have been a disaster, and it nearly is. But the words are not just “I want your body”, but “I miss your body”, and he means the latter just as much. It’s hard not to be compelled by the way Mino moans the title--horniness and despair as the same emotion, which they often are. (This makes two Winner members who have released songs about not being virgins. If we never get anything from Winner again, at least we have that.)
19. Lovelyz, “Destiny” This is the first Lovelyz single that makes them sound like they’re related to their labelmates Infinite, with swooning strings and minor-key romantic obsession, so of course it’s my favourite of theirs yet. (Well, I liked their pretty matching costumes, too.) It makes a great “Moonlight Densetsu” substitute, but I don’t really hear this as “anime music” in the way others have referred to it; maybe it’s the beautiful, mysterious mood that sits over it all.
18. Oh My Girl, “Windy Day” Racist promotional tie-ins aside, the trick this pulls off never gets old.
17. Hanhae, “I Used To” I’m a little embarrassed about this one, because Hanhae’s tale here is very petty and not a little misogynist and yet this is one of the songs I listened to most this year. I’d love to say it’s only because of that galloping blue-neon beat, but truthfully, it’s also because of how Hanhae rides it, fading away on the choruses and working himself into hysterics at the bridge.
16. Red Velvet, “Russian Roulette” Hearing the Oh!-era SNSD and Yasutaka Nakata in this unlocked it for me, and turned it from a bauble into something more forceful but no less cheerfully frivolous.
15. Blackpink, “Playing With Fire” As the last 4-member YG girl group with electro-rap tendencies standing, Blackpink have their work cut out for them. “Playing With Fire” has none of the tricks of “Whistle” or “Boombayah”, with the girls rhyming their own names with “bottle full of Henny” or changing tempo and genre at whiplash speeds. It’s just a straightforward, confident pop song that makes each member already sound like a superstar--the real legacy of 2NE1’s music.
14. Heize, “And July (feat. DEAN and DJ Friz)” I’ll fume forever about what a good, proper duet this could’ve been with more Heize, but I can’t stay fuming while I’m listening to this beat and their perfectly matched vocals.
13. NU’EST, “Overcome” “Overcome” is a return to NU’EST’s debut-era dubstep premise that is firmly contemporary. The electronics swirl and rattle and swarm, and the members are the calm at the centre of the dust storm.
12. Sistar, “I Like That” Their summer sax mode teams up with their dramatic strings mode, and the result is a high-energy stomper about how men are unreliable garbage--in other words, peak Sistar.
11. Taemin, “Press Your Number” I still love the idea of a lukewarm description of intimacy (from when the song was called “Press Your Body”) being transformed into a distant plea for it instead, and the contrast of Taemin’s natural coldness with the warmth of the production.
10. Tiffany, “I Just Wanna Dance” Tiffany’s mini album, I Just Wanna Dance, was one of the highlights of the year. In the title track, she sings about being so overwhelmed by the beauty of the city at night that she can’t even express it in words. That overwhelming feeling is channelled into the music, too, and those whistle notes soar like fireworks, bypassing words completely for pure emotional power.
9. ELO, “Rose” As a member of VV:D, ELO is in some rare company (plus Loco). Gray, Zion.T and Crush have been confidently renovating Korean R&B over the last few years, and with his 8 Femmes mini album, ELO proves himself worthy of joining that list. Produced by Gray, “Rose” is an effervescent summer roller disco dream, with funky guitar strokes, a drummer that won’t quit, and ELO smoothly holding his own over it all.
8. Giriboy, “I’m In Trouble (feat. Loco)” The opening sounds huge to me, especially once that syncopated jump-rope beat comes in. It heralds Giriboy’s transformation (on this song, anyway) from slightly obnoxious soft-boy rapper to full-blown pop star. To that end, Loco plays the “featured rapper” role perfectly, down to the little bit where he sings the melody.
7. GFriend, “Rough” I often get stuck on the question of what makes me love GFriend so much when I can’t stand singles by APink that seem to be a similar kind of ‘90s-inspired uplift. But I think the answer is that unlike APink’s major-key cooing, GFriend’s singles have a knowledge of the bitterness of life--it’s that slight toughness in Yuju’s voice when she sings the first line of the chorus, I wasn’t able to tell you, but I liked you--which makes me buy the sweetness so much more.
6. EXO, “Lucky One” The beat never lets up; even when it drops away in the prechorus, the heartbeat of the bass drum still thumps in the background. The vocals don’t let up, either--there’s hardly four counts without them until the end--and their counter-rhythms and harmonic chords are an endless source of listening pleasure.
5. Crush, “woo ah” “woo-ah” is pretty and it knows it, so Crush is more interested in exploring how far he can push that prettiness: with his angelic voice, exercised to its full crooning/falsetto/whisper/breaking point potential; and with the restless production, which subtly foreshadows the spaceship-blastoff coda (toward the next track on the album, the loopy “9 to 5”) that lifts this song into the stratosphere.
4. 100%, “Better Day” This is the kind of song I listen to K-pop for: fully committed, soaring drama that moves with the sleek swiftness of a light passing over the window of the getaway car.
3. BTS, “Blood Sweat & Tears” There’s not much more I can add to what’s been written about this song as one of the best songs of the year. It’s a last dance before the end of the world, and it goes silent just before that ending comes, and leaves you holding your breath.
2. Ladies’ Code, “Galaxy” While “The Rain”, their second single of the year, is also excellent, the arresting quietude of “Galaxy” is hard to forget. The song is a swirl of stardust, but at its core is stillness: “안녕, 기다렸어”, delivered by Zuny with quiet understatement, the most beautiful lyric of the year. Hello, she sings to the universe, I’ve waited.
1. Luna, “Free Somebody” 2016 was the year I started dancing again, picking up new dance styles (waacking, house, vogue femme) and learning other people’s choreography. 2016 was the year that K-pop embraced dance, too, more than ever before: with dance-oriented idol competition shows like Hit the Stage; with a surge in special stages and variety show segments of idols doing other groups’ choreography; and most of all, in the music, as house has joined EDM as an essential part of the current K-pop sound.
SM didn’t originate the use of house beats in K-pop, but they kickstarted the current trend of it with SHINee’s “View” and f(x)’s “4 Walls”, so it’s no surprise that they’ve offered the year’s best K-pop songs to dance to. EXO’s thumping “Artificial Love” and NCT 127’s optimistic “Switch” have kept my feet moving on the bus and down the street all year.
“Free Somebody” is another SM song that makes me want to dance. But more than that, it’s a song that captures how dancing makes me feel: so full, so free that you’re erupting with it, and you want to help somebody else find that feeling, too. (Though I agree with Katherine St Asaph that it’s also “freak somebody”, perhaps in the demo.) Dance is about expressing emotions found in music, and that’s what’s so absorbing about it. And it’s so nice when the emotion of the music is joy.














