Aespa’s 4th Mini Album is full of beats, rap choruses, and 90’s R&B vibes worth 40 million streams.
For some reason, K-pop is deemed as a ‘guilty pleasure’ within Australia. Its fanbase is astronomical, but yet as a genre, it still struggles to find its way onto Aussie radio stations. This is largely thanks to the misconception that as a whole, K-pop is just cheesy, over-produced cash-grabs. Truth is, it’s far from that.
As the iconic Korean rapper and producer Teddy Park pointed out in the Blackpink documentary, Light Up The Sky, “What even is K-pop? The only thing is the language.”
He’s spot on, and Aespa‘s latest drop, Drama – The 4th Mini Album, solidifies this. Beyond the fact that the quartet belts out lyrics in Korean, you’d hardly peg it as a typical K-pop release.
The title track, ‘Drama’, delivers beats reminiscent of M.I.A’s ‘Bad Girls’, intertwining heavy rap choruses with infectiously sung beat-drops. ‘Trick or Treat’ ventures into industrially tinged alt-rap beats, in a way that evokes representations of tension and mania. Meanwhile, ‘Don’t Blink’ leans into soulful harmonies and ‘90s R&B aesthetic.
It’s a release that will appeal to fans of any era of pop music, not just K-pop fanatics. Evidently, it already has, with the EP’s closing track, ‘Better Things’, clocking in at 40 million streams on Spotify alone. To put that in perspective, at the time of writing this review, that’s as many streams as Dua Lipa’s ‘Houdini’ and The Kid Laroi’s ‘Bleed’ combined.
No joke, the K-pop fanbase is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps it’s high time Australian listeners explore what all the hype is about.
Label: SM Entertainment
