erie’s 2025 in music

Posted: 2026-01-08

Updated: 2026-01-08

Tags: criticism

I guess I'm doing this again. For some reason Youtube is getting more anal about allowing embeds of music so this year the page may look even uglier than last year.

Section 1. Live music

Some scattered notes on shows I saw this year.

Yves, tripleS (twice), ARTMS

I saw four k-pop concerts this year. I think the most interesting/funny aspect was how different the fandom gender splits across acts are. Yves and ARTMS, being formerly part of LOONA, attracted largely female audiences, while according to Discord, lecherous middle-aged men filled the discounted balcony seats at tripleS. Part of it, I suspect, is that the original LOONA fandom (called “orbits”) drew in a lot of women and gays, partly due to gaybaiting (this is a very cynical way to put it as their first creative director Jaden Jeong’s later work with OnlyOneOf suggests to me that he sincerely cares about LGBT representation). Since the resulting fanbase always had an online and subcultural presence much larger and more vocal than would be expected from the group’s actual streaming or sales numbers, this created an underdog complex and cultish devotion to the group, which was intensified when Blockberry kicked Chuu, leading to a series of lawsuits that released all members from their contractual obligations. (The courts siding with the idols over their company was, and still is, a very unusual result for the industry.)

Despite expectations, LOONA failed to reform ¹, and the remaining orbits have become even more fanatical in their support, like the UFO cultists in When Prophecy Fails (a fradulent but fun work of sociological “research”). All of this was probably a barrier to any potential influx of new straight male fans (a more realistic and depressing reason is that being in their mid-late twenties, the ARTMS girls are “too old” for this insane industry so maybe this is for the best). In fact, if Twitter is at all representative of the fandom (not really), many of the most clout-chasing orbits are now locked in constant civil war over basically every detail of ARTMS’s management and output, leading to the disillusionment of everybody else, much like the collapse of the Japanese United Red Army. Anyways the main real world consequence of the cultishness is of course that the concerts are way more entertaining. Also, at ARTMS I wore my hoodie from the Yves show and seeing a bunch of dudes wearing the same hoodie confronted me with the fact that human beings are not really “unique” after all, contrary to popular belief.

On the other hand, tripleS, being a newer group, has no such fandom dynamic (although by virtue of sharing management with ARTMS, their fanbase sometimes gets involved in internecine orbit disputes against their will) and, as you would expect, attracts an audience of mostly straight men who are interested in cute girls like Yooyeon. Given that both of their tour lineups this year were new tour-specific subunits, they are also noticeably less polished than sister group ARTMS on stage. This is kind of the charm, I guess: from the moment Yoon Seoyeon was revealed as the first member, tripleS has been about development and change as opposed to static perfection. Anyways, Yves and ARTMS probably had the loudest crowds I’ve heard at any show. At first I didn’t have my earplugs in at Yves, but I immediately rectified that after the first crowd pop. I have quite a bit more to say about the two Modhaus groups (tripleS and ARTMS) so I’ll leave that for a later section. The shows were fun though, nobody in the balcony (i.e. the cheap seats) bothers to memorize the fanchants so it’s morally justified to terrorize them by screaming the fanchants as loud as possible.

Eiko Ishibashi

I didn’t really know what to expect going in. Ishibashi’s work spans (among other things) drumming for post-punk outfit Panicsmile, electroacoustic improvisation, film scores for Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and singer-songwritery work like this year’s Antigone. I think that she might have played a few shows this year with songs from Antigone on the setlist but when I saw her she basically did the whole show with a flute, a Macbook, and a table full of effects pedals. Really transporting experience. Great musician.

My summer vacation

I did some travelling in June/July this year with friends in east Asia. We stayed a few nights in Shimokitazawa, perhaps now best known among Westerners as the Tokyo neighbourhood where Bocchi the Rock mostly takes place (Shelter, the venue that Starry is based on, has a sign outside asking tourists not to crowd at the top of the stairs taking photos). It’s possible that Shimokita has the highest density of live music venues anywhere in the world. Starting in the afternoon you start seeing lots of young people lugging around crash cymbals, guitars, and amps as they head to gigs. People care about music here and it feels like a pretty special place. We only ended up seeing two shows while we stayed there, a dub night at LIVE HAUS and some poppier acts at Three. These venues are surprisingly small, but small venues are really the foundation of any musical scene, since they make it economically viable for new acts to play lots of gigs. I suppose eventually the bigger acts go on to Spotify O-nest in Shibuya and places like that.

We also made a trip out to Ashikaga, a small city in Tochigi prefecture that happens to be where Shunji Iwai shot All About Lily Chou-Chou. I did not know this fact until after I’d already written it into our schedule, and procrastinated on watching the film so long that I still haven’t seen it. The one night we were there, staying in a business hotel across from Banna-ji, my friend watched it in his room and in the morning said that it was just as well we weren’t staying too long. Anyways, the reason I wanted to go was to catch local band Sabanoomisony supporting Yokosuka’s Fallsheeps touring in support of their new album. I’d seen them both on NMFT last year and thought it would be fun to get out of Tokyo and catch them on home turf ².

As it happens, that show also happened to be the 15th anniversary of the venue (Soundhouse Pico). The bill was six bands long. One of the things I liked the most about Japanese concerts is the professionalism that bands and venues show when it comes to sticking to set times. Ashikaga is about the size of my hometown, and while I don’t understand Japanese, I could at least figure out that having a venue like Pico is important for developing homegrown talent (the first act was a band of local highschoolers) as well as providing touring opportunities for other bands in Tochigi or neighbouring Gunma and Ibaraki. Also, this is kind of a commonplace, but on average the level of musicianship in Japan is really high when it comes to going to random venues and seeing bands you’ve never heard of before.

Afterwards I went to Taipei for about a week to visit friends and wander around some of Edward Yang’s shooting locations for Yi Yi, and then went to Seoul for a few nights by myself before flying home. Since I had nothing planned beyond maybe looking for some tripleS music video shooting locations, I wound up seeing your arms are my cocoon in Sinchon. They were on their Asia tour supported by a few local bands. This was definitely the rowdiest crowd of the trip and maybe the most fun I had at a show all year. Local metal-inflected screamo act palecistus was one of their openers and received a hero’s welcome. All the bands that night were pretty good but these two definitely stood out for me, partly because of how awesome their drummers are, attacking their kits with all manner of double kicks, blast beats, etc. Shot of adrenaline. yaamc played two encores, which I’ve never seen happen (and apparently had never happened to them before either), which is even crazier considering that they had to fly to Hong Kong the next morning at like 6 am. In general I have been listening to a lot more screamo-type stuff this year or post-hardcore after the trip, like Sapporo’s awesome three-piece Tattletale, 2000s Shimokita-kei legends Ling Tosite Sigure, and Detroit’s jacked maximalist collective The Armed.

The next night in Seoul, I went back to Sinchon to visit Kuchu Camp, a Fishmans-themed bar. For those not in the know, here is my rough and possibly inaccurate gloss on the history of Fishmans.

Formed in late 1980s Tokyo as a band of college student friends, Fishmans gigged around Shimokitazawa playing their brand of laid-back ska before getting signed to Polydor. Under Polydor their output got a bit more eclectic and a bit more influenced by dream pop. Good examples might include “Night Cruising” off the album Kuuchuu Camp (the namesake of this bar, obviously), which shows off frontman Shinji Sato’s distinctive falsetto, as well as their single “Season”. At some point, frontman Sato had the idea of extending “Season” into a thirty-something minute long album called, appropriately, Long Season (or maybe they wrote Long Season and then released “Season” as a teaser, I’m not sure). This was a real high water mark in their output: its composition uses a few riffs from the original to stitch together a meandering, beautiful journey through a densely textured soundscape (I write in cliches, it’s terminal, I can’t help it). While this was not career-defining at the time (apparently their earlier Polydor releases are better known in Japan), it became arguably their most distinctive work for overseas audiences. At the end of 1998, Fishmans played a final concert to send off their bassist (Fishmans went through quite a few lineup changes), which was immortalized in the live album 98.12.28 Otokotachino Wakare, which features a forty-something minute long rendition of “Long Season”. As it turned out, this was to be their last concert with Sato as he unexpectedly and tragically passed away in early 1999. Afterwards, their reputation continued to grow, especially among other musicians both in Japan and elsewhere, and in the internet age also found distribution and increased word of mouth via the Rate Your Music-/mu/-soulseek industrial complex.

Kuchu Camp the Seoul bar is pretty nice. It’s a small space, partly below street level, but tastefully decorated. As far as I can tell, they sometimes hold literary readings or small concerts. Unsurprisingly the only music they play is Fishmans, although a lot of the tracks are remixes of b-sides I haven’t heard that many times. When I went, there was a Japanese couple, a few Korean girls, and later on a Korean couple on a date. I had some makgeolli and a wasabi-flavoured rice puff snack. The girl behind the bar was very nice and gave me a sticker when I left.

Thoughts from and about Seoul. Admitting my relative ignorance, I may as well write down some further impressions of Korea despite the near-certainty of professing knowledge or insight I do not actually possess. I hadn’t expected Seoul to leave much of an impression at all but it did. Like many global metropolises, Seoul seems to inspire both love and hatred in its denizens. Similarly to Taipei and Tokyo, it is a capital city with a somewhat parasitic relationship to the rest of the country. Whereas Osaka is at least a somewhat credible “second city” for Japan, Seoul’s economic, demographic, and social dominance has no serious competitor in the rest of the country. Salaries are higher in Seoul (although cost of living is not cheap, relatively speaking) and all of the top three SKY universities (Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei) are located in Seoul, making it a chokepoint for those seeking social mobility via education. This concentration extends to hagwons, privately operated cram schools which exist to tutor students for, among other things, the famously competitive Suneung, equivalent to the Chinese gaokao (although I recently learned that gaokao content and format can vary quite a bit between provinces so maybe it doesn’t make sense to speak of “the” gaokao). As the reputations of cram schools are based on their illustrious tutors and impressive matriculations to top Seoul universities, children from around the country are shipped in to attend courses taught by particularly famous gurus. This is one of several forces that results in young people being sucked into Seoul and depopulating the rest of the country ³. This brings me to the weird contradiction about Seoul that tourists may observe, which is that in a country with very low fertility rates driven by a collapse in marriage rates (similarly to Japan and China), a large number - possibly the majority - of young people that you see in public seem to be on a date. This is obviously easy to explain by way of selection effects (maybe people don’t go outside if they aren’t on a date or with friends), but in a dense city like Seoul, this explanation naturally suggests a somewhat horrifying mental image, which is that for every happy couple you observe out and about (and there are a lot of them), there are a dozen indoor mole people in gosiwons eking out a subsistence dependent on Samyang instant noodle products and Instagram reels or DCinside.

I think this kind of duality (the first impression of a harmless or pleasant phenomenon and its distressing obverse side, only revealed upon further reflection), is basically emblematic of South Korea. A part of Seoul I really liked is the Cheonggyecheon stream, which has along its banks spaces to sit and walk, as well as various photo-ready art installations. Seniors sit in the shade of criss-crossing bridges amid stifling summer heat and sweaty schoolchildren on field trips are herded across its footpaths to unknown destinations. The Cheonggyecheon began life as a seasonal stream that frequently flooded during the summer rainy season. Many public works projects were undertaken to dredge the banks and alleviate the problem during the Joseon dynasty before it eventually became a sewer for Seoul’s expanding population under Sejong the Great in the fifteenth century. Under the Japanese occupation, various projects were drawn up to improve the sewage system as part of the broader imperial project to rationalize colonial governance, but their implementation was interrupted by World War Two. Afterwards, its neglect continued as new plans for covering up the eyesore were again scuttled, this time by the outbreak of the Korean war. After the war, refugees settled in shacks built along either side of the Cheonggyecheon, which at this point was still a massive, poorly maintained open sewer. Conditions were fetid. Under Syngman Rhee, the Cheonggyecheon sewer was finally paved over, and an elevated freeway was built above it in the 1970s during the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee. The Cheonggyecheon is well-known among urbanists as an example of the Downs-Thomson paradox: as the freeway fell into disrepair, possibly due to the 1997 financial crisis ⁴, it was demolished in 2003, which actually reduced the amount of traffic in Seoul by causing increased substitution to public transit. While it serves as a nice “natural” break in the midst of a dense metropolis, the stream is largely manmade, as keeping it running year round requires pumping thousands of tonnes of water daily from the Han river.

Surfaces. South Korea produces some of the most beautiful surfaces in the world: bleeding-edge screens for consumer electronics, poreless skin for celebrities who now inspire global envy and devotion, and glass edifices for a capital city whose people once lived in shacks beside a sewer. The construction of these surfaces has come at immense human cost, some of which can be entirely blamed on the whims of a small group of unaccountable individuals whose abuses, even those within living memory, are unlikely to ever face justice. Crossing a bridge at midnight, the woman beside me on the bus takes out her phone to photograph the city lights glinting on the black surface of the Han river below.

Bladee

I saw Bladee on the Martyr tour this fall. I regret not showing up four hours before doors so I could buy some of the ugly merch. They had a setup where a dude ran around Bladee on stage with a handheld camera whose feed got projected on the screen behind him in real time so that it felt like you were inside a music video. It was a lot of fun, and I stumbled out of the show into the night with my shirt soaked through with sweat. The setlist felt like it rewarded oldheads: he played a lot of old tracks I didn’t think I’d ever get to hear live. I didn’t realize how many people apparently know every Bladee lyric, and the fact that I don’t have the lyrics to “Waster” memorized anymore spurred some reflection on Bladee’s career and the time I’ve spent following him.

I have listened to Bladee since 2018 according to last.fm, when I must have been queueing DOTA 2 playing “Psycho” ft. Adamn Killa on repeat throughout the winter. (I got into Adamn Killa around the time he dropped “Ten” with Yung Lean, who I’d been listening to since high school). Apparently I stopped listening to him in the new year, and then started up again at the end of 2019 when I started listening to Icedancer a lot and got into the rest of his discography, obsessively listening to Eversince while trudging through grey half-melted slush and regretting my life. Although it’s not consistent with this data, I seem to remember that “Sugar” was the first Bladee song I really liked: while the basic idea is kind of facile, the first line of the verse (“Demons say, I deserve your DNA”) is so out of left field and original in its paranoia. Of course, the beat (produced by the uber talented Whitearmor and rip) is iconic, with typically icy and industrial synth patches giving way to rattling 808s that shows its debt to Chief Keef, a connection even more obvious on tracks like “Inside Out” (strings) or Drain Gang’s collaborations with Chief Keef producer DJ Kenn ⁵ like “Butterfly”. This year Trash Island was also released, a Drain Gang mixtape that demonstrates their distinctive styles but also shared aesthetic sensibility.

At the end of 2019 I also accepted that I was not going to graduate college on time and switched to an easier program, but with lower academic expectations I also began to feel somewhat lighter. For the first time in a few years, I had a simple plan for the future and could think more than a semester ahead. For some reason this previous state of affairs had not suggested to me that psychiatric (more to the point, pharmaceutical) intervention may have been warranted. In any case it was a moot point. In March of 2020, of course, COVID-19 went from a foreign curiosity to a local news story across North America. I went home at the end of the semester and more or less stayed in my childhood bedroom until the spring of 2022. During this time I listened to a lot of Bladee, especially “Waster”. While Exeter, his first 2020 release, had a few good tracks, I didn’t listen to it that much ⁶, and actually I didn’t remember where DNA RAIN was from when he played it on tour this year. On the other hand, I was very enthusiastic about the surprise release of 333 in July. This project included more of the increasingly prominent esotericism displayed in Exeter, as well as Drain Gang’s drift away from aping US trap more generally. A track like “Hero of My Story 3style3” to my mind displays Bladee’s better use of his vocal range and application of autotune while “Finder” and “Reality Surf” add a woozy, derealized touch to a perennial Bladee topic: the conflict between celebrity culture and self-realization (while not as big as he is now, Drain Gang definitely inspired cultish devotion from the beginning). At the end of the year, Bladee dropped Good Luck with Mechatok, which was alright for the most part (“Drama” is a banger though).

In May 2021, Bladee surprise released The Fool. Along with 333, I think it represented a new sonic space for Bladee and collaborators, whose mix of inspirations and songwriting habits could be said to have found a coherent style that truly belonged to them. However, we are all children of Chief Keef and this change in sound could also just be described as a journey from “Don’t Like” to “Citgo”. The Fool also includes two great love songs: “I Think…”, with its ingenious sample of “Rhythm Is a Dancer” and reflections on the impermanence not only of love but human existence itself, and “BBY”, featuring one of his most perfectly calibrated vocal performances flowing over trance stabs and a rattling kick. Like most writers working in their second language, what makes Bladee interesting is his approach to the language, which seems somehow unmoored from the usual invisible schemas which guide the choices of native speakers. This is not to say that speaking your second language makes you immune to received thoughts and cliches, but that whatever schematic of English you arrive at has the possibility of being a recombination of those received thoughts and cliches somewhat orthogonal to those of native speakers, assuming you haven’t learned it out of a textbook or from the BBC World Service. At the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, I experienced something like a hypomanic episode centering around a sudden obsession with making money ⁷ and made a somewhat ill-advised career decision that moved me across the country.

I spent somewhat less time listening to Bladee in 2022. I gave Crest a cursory listen and to be honest I still haven’t gotten around to listening to Spiderr, his second album of the year. I must have been pretty unhappy this year as I spent a lot of time listening to Eversince again. Apparently Bladee actually wrote all of his lyrics for Eversince ahead of time as opposed to basically just punching in at the studio on his later albums like most artists do now, which maybe contributes to the sense of solidity that project has. It’s a well-made object. Actually I think there’s an interview where he accurately refers to it as “a classic, if I do say so myself”. In 2023 I did not listen to much Bladee at all and I went to graduate school, partly because I wasn’t sure how to deal with whatever was wrong with me and my ability to make decisions, and further education was a simple way to postpone questions of how to live and what to want. At some point during this academic year I had to admit to a classmate that I hadn’t actually listened to Spiderr yet.

In April of 2024, Bladee surprise released Cold Visions. At this point I was somewhat over the Christian mysticism, which I found faintly irritating and not particularly interesting, but this project marked a new rupture in his discography. Rather than marking his increased distance from the 2010s trap production that inspired his original sound, Cold Visions staked a position in the crowded field of Chicago drill’s mutant 2024 Soundcloud rage offspring. Unapologetically abrasive, the production on Cold Visions is a willing and irresponsible participant in today’s 808 arms race ⁸. At the same time, it establishes its continuity with earlier career work that I characterize as “evil Bladee”, e.g. the snarling “Best Buy” (f1lthy and the Working on Dying crew have become like the fathers of rage rap so this kind of came full circle) or the furious delivery on little-known 2018 loosie “Cover Up”. His participation in what is increasingly a young man’s game also seems like the natural backdrop for his lyrical hobbyhorse of ambivalence towards fame. At 30 he seems genuinely unsure of where he is, where he’s going, and perhaps even where he has been ⁹. Dense references abound to his earlier work, and especially to repeated phrases and symbols (“red light”, “trash star”, “rain world”) that once formed some tapestry of private meaning which must now be excavated and interpreted anew. The optimistic mysticism of Exeter onwards is cast aside for a frank description of his continued struggles with pressures internal and external. “They won’t let up on me, man/Not even a moment.”

On “LOWS PARTLYY”, a description as good as any other of the creative process:

I spent so many nights trying to get right (I try, I try, I did, I tried)

Trying to make it out, stuck in my fucking mind

I said so many rhymes, oh so many times (I said, I said, I did)

Ten years later, I still don’t know what it means (I still don’t know)

(In a dark hole with no–) In a dark hole with no lights

Trying to make something that counts

Trying to make something I like

But like, shit a’ight (A’ight)

If everything you ever did hit mid (Huh, for real)

How could you give a shit? (I’m trying to have fun with this shit, man)

(In a dark hole with no–) It says nothing to me about my life

Your songs say a lot of things, but nothing that means anything

Section 2. Other stuff

I didn’t think this division through very carefully because while I had planned to name this section “music I didn’t see live” it’s not strictly true since I committed above to writing a bunch of shit down about tripleS and ARTMS, which I intend to make good on.

a note on shimokita-kei

Earlier I used the term Shimokita-kei, which refers to what could be described more wordily and uselessly as “Shimokitazawa guitar music”. This phrase has a certain cultural coherence. Shimokita-kei has a few characteristics (keeping in mind that this is a very loose grouping of bands and not a rigorous taxonomy) that I particularly like and differentiate it from the American and British genres it pulls from. For one, there is a focus on writing poppy vocal leads in genres that don’t always have them. For example, two female fronted bands: MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS and Kinoko Teikoku. Now shoegaze purists may complain that the prominence of these vocals shifts these bands out of the realm of shoegaze into “dream pop” but I think this is kind of a pointless boundary. In particular, I think post-Kinoko Teikoku, the best J-gaze bands active today like Hammer Head Shark and kurayamisaka are way more interesting and fun to listen to than their most successful equivalents here, which would be revivalists like Wisp and others who sound more or less homogenous. This is partly because a lot of TikTok shoegaze revival acts are apparently just singing over instrumentals that an anonymous guy called Grayskies puts up on BeatStars.

Anyways, polemic completed, I’ll take some huge liberties with this label to talk about some other Asian bands that I didn’t get to see live, some of which I only learned about via Youtube recommendations while my IP address was in Japan.

Texas 3000

Effortlessly cool three-piece playing emo-Americana refracted through a looking glass. American frontman and Japanese drummer met at Hatagaya Forestlimit before adding Chinese bassist. They have like 3 songs that are literally the same thing with different lyrics. How do they get away with it?

Nikoん

Another awesome Japanese three-piece that get really deep in the pocket. Saw them last year as part of NMFT, really regret that I didn’t have a chance to see them on this trip. Apparently may come back on a future tour, which would be great. They got signed this year and released a new album. From the various clips I’ve seen from their livestreams or on Youtube, they are improving at an unbelievable rate.

Hardnuts

Saw them in Ashikaga, was really impressed by how tight they were. Their friends in sidenerds are also sick.

Trooper Salute

These guys are on a lot of bills with Japanese bands I already like, which makes me positively disposed towards them. They play a pretty original mix of twee indie rock, jazz pop, and an undercurrent of post-hardcore (maybe a little like heliotrope). This is probably the best song they’ve written so far, with its massive final build into the end as good as anything by your post-rock favourites.

Dabda

This Korean math rock outfit is really, really good. Like Trooper Salute, they have a really charismatic frontwoman but in this case the level of instrumental firepower at their disposal is even more insane. Clearly big fans of toe, they have some sick videos up on Youtube where they perform alongside drummer Takashi Kashikura with two kits on stage and their own drummer, Seunghyeon Lee, is no slouch himself. This track in particular reminds me of Imogen Heap when the instrumentals drop out, leaving only Jiae Kim’s processed vocals. A lot of bands in Asia in particular seem to play this blend of female-led math rock & post-rock but nobody is as good as these guys.

Hiperson

I actually started planning my trip to Asia this summer because I saw Hiperson would be playing a music festival in Seoul which would obviate the hassle of getting a Chinese visa and trying to figure out when they were playing domestic shows. It ended up not working out, but I have still the concepts of a plan for a Zhang Lu themed itinerary from Seoul to Gyeongju, then to Fukuoka via ferry from Busan, before terminating in the canals of Yanagawa.

Anyways they’re still really good. Haven’t released any new music, but this rendition of Xindu Ren with Mimik Banka is amazing. Seems like they have a new bassist now.

Manami Kakudo

I came across 2024’s Contact at the beginning of the year and it reminded me of another favourite artist, Julia Holter. Kakudo has a rigorous yet jaunty approach to composition. These are songs with distinct textures, fleet-footed and confident songs. She has a magician’s flair for the theatrical that I really like, and the playfulness reminds me of a high school favourite, The Books’ Lemon of Pink.

k-pop

a loose best of 2025 list

Some say this was a bad year for k-pop. IDK, maybe. But I also felt much less engaged this year so it’s not like I listened to so much k-pop that I feel confident in saying it was a bad year. In any case I have made life easier for myself and made a top 10 instead of top 20.

10. ifeye, “r u ok?”

On their second comeback “r u ok”, ifeye is as confident and polished as any rookie group has ever been, especially considering they are the first group produced by their company. “r u ok” is a bit of a shapeshifter, making use of three languages, detuned 808s and a wobbling sub-bass, house piano stabs, and reggaeton rhythms. It seems like the fun part of writing for a girl group rather than a solo artist is the ability to direct a much wider variety of vocal performances and this track definitely makes use of that freedom. One of the catchiest choruses of the year.

9. Choerry, “Pressure” / Kim Lip, “Can You Entertain?”

In the runup for their second international tour of the year, ARTMS released a bunch of solo tracks. When LOONA debuted, Jaden Jeong famously insisted on debuting each member with their own solo song and a b-side at enormous expense, so this was kind of interesting as an expression of the girls’ growth. Some of the original solo tracks are probably too iconic at this point to ever fairly compare (Yves’ and Chuu’s are in another stratosphere), and the Odd Eye Circle solos (“Eclipse”, “Singing in the Rain”, “Love Cherry Motion”) are definitely among them. That said, I think this round of solos was pretty good all things considered, with these two being particularly good. I couldn’t decide between them but given the rest of the list I don’t want to come across as even more of a Modhaus dick rider than I already am so I’ve put them jointly at place 9.

Unsurprisingly I totally loved “Pressure” and its super distorted heavy 808s sliding beneath one of the most twee songs I’ve heard all year. Choerry is such a perfect match for this track, which is kind of like an evil version of an ILLIT song. The music video is also pretty good. Jaden has a blog post where he says Effie is the future of Korea and this song & video might reflect that.

“Can You Entertain?” is appropriately kind of nostalgic, this time for indie sleaze and that era of party photography. It is somewhat less internet-poisoned than “Pressure”. Its farty retro bass is good, and the chorus had me levitating. The post-chorus is also really cunty (are you allowed to say that if you’re a straight and cisgender male). Kim Lip can do pretty much anything.

The ARTMS show I went to was really great. Modhaus is really stingy or paranoid about letting tripleS sing live but ARTMS’s live vocals were pretty awesome to experience. Overall the whole set seemed to have much more attention to detail: even the VCRs and background projections were much better and well thought-out than the tripleS visuals, a lot of which looked like it put the “mid” in “Midjourney”. I think ARTMS is definitely Jaden’s baby and the level of execution for their concepts is higher even when you consider that they’re a logistically simpler group (they have five members but pretty much anything would be simpler than the literal biggest active k-pop girl group to run) and also vastly more experienced. Interestingly when Modhaus’s first boy group idntt debuted this year they also seemed much more polished right off the bat which suggests tripleS is in the somewhat unfortunate position of being Modhaus’s lab rats.

8. tripleS, “Q&A”

As has seemingly become their habit, tripleS’s first comeback this year (Assemble25) had a pretty mediocre title track but a string of absurdly good b-sides. I particularly liked “Love Child”, with a writing credit from now-Modhaus CEO Jaden Jeong. Like tripleS’s best track to date, “Seoul Sonyo Sound” with its depiction of naked avarice and urban anomie, “Love Child” has a similarly off-beat (for k-pop) take on girlhood, its references to a happy childhood providing an unusual psychological realist take on the unrequited love song. Also good are the smooth, retro-futuristic “Firework Diary” and chamber poppy “Friend Zone”. While Assemble25 is probably not as good as some of their earlier releases (at this point it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever top LOVElution’s Muhan), its highlights do display a positive trend, which is that the writers and producers seem to have a much better sense of how to use the members’ vocal tones. It’s possible that I’ve just been following tripleS so long that I can finally recognize almost all of their singing voices, but I think that everyone got a chance to shine vocally on this album in a way that has not been the case in most of their previous output. This should be one of the underrated advantages of having such a large group: the songwriters have a much more varied palette to paint with, especially with voices as unique as Sohyun, Shion, Yubin, etc.

Now you will notice that “Q&A” is not on Assemble25, but in fact their second comeback of the year, November’s Beyond Beauty. With a long delay between comebacks, many WAVs despaired as to whether there would be a subunit comeback this year or if we would get griefed like last year when the only subunit was 12-member Visionary Vision and a decent chunk of the group was left “unemployed”. This did not happen and instead the group was split into four 6-member subunits, with leaders chosen by blind draw and members chosen via fan vote ¹⁰. Hayeon was assigned the leader of subunit Zenith. On the first day of voting, Yeonji whales banded together to assign her to Zenith with a huge amount of votes, frustrating the Sohyun whales who had plotted to pair her with Hayeon for a fresh combination. In the next two days, shippers voted in Jiwoo and Yubin, defeating the uncreative maknae agenda (which would have just sent all the youngest members into Zenith). Finally Joobin and Soomin were voted in on days four and five of voting. Now, none of these members are hugely popular. I don’t think any have ever cracked top 5 in bias lists or top Objekt sales in the OT24 era as far as I’m aware. However, this unit wound up delivering probably the best tripleS music show performance of all time, with each member getting an unusually large share of the spotlight. In this case the fan hivemind actually worked to instantiate the original promise of tripleS, which was that we’d get fresh combinations and see new chemistries and aspects of the members. It was honestly pretty good to see some of the more underrated members get the spotlight. Jiwoo and Joobin vocals, Hayeon and Yeonji as all-rounders, and Yubin and Soomin as centres turned out to be a great combination and one which really indulged the part of my brain that thinks about k-pop in Moneyball terms.

“Q&A” was also kind of a Moneyball pick. While Moon was able to lock down “Cameo” as a consensus pick almost before member voting had finished, Sun and Neptune voters engaged in a vicious knives-in-trenches battle for “Fly Up”, which left “Q&A” open for Zenith voters to pick up without much resistance. This resulted in an intensification of the Sun and Neptune battle, as the loser would have to make do with “Bubble Gum”, possibly the worst demo in tripleS history. I’m actually kind of convinced that this track was included in the vote just to make WAVs pay more money to save their bias from having to perform it. Anyways “Q&A” ended up being much better than I expected. The build from the intro to the first chorus is such a rush of energy and the whole track vaguely reminds me of Red Velvet’s “I Just” or Matt and Kim, in a good way.

7. RESCENE, “Deja Vu”

Overall I think RESCENE had a much weaker run than last year when they claimed positions 5 and 1 on my list. However, “Deja Vu”, a sweet song about memory and reunion, was a real highlight. A lot of what I like about their best songs is present here: backing harmonies, mechanical sounds made warm and inviting, and a propulsive rhythm. RESCENE does have a vague concept, something to do with scent, and this track’s lyrics tie together scent and nostalgia. Earlier in the year they had a song called “In My Lotion” which contains the lyric “dreaming of Proust” so surely this is no accident. Pretty much everything in and around this song was handled with a lot of care. The “Dearest Lab” website they set up as part of the promo has a very cute y2k computing aesthetic that also feels really nostalgic to me but unfortunately due to an expired SSL certificate it’s currently not working. I love the Shunji Iwai-influenced music video (to the extent that I’m leaving it embedded even though I know it won’t show up) with its hyperreal lighting, dutch angle close-ups, and dreamy camcorder aesthetic. It’s one of their best choreos so far, and the part where May walks around the girls acting out clock hands is really cute ¹¹.

6. NMIXX, “KNOW ABOUT ME”

I have been known to be an NMIXX hater in the past. Their discography has a lot of failed experiments. However, they are clearly a pretty capable group and between their own abilities, the backing of big three agency JYP, and a general willingness to try new things, it was probably just a matter of time before they struck gold. This year they released a lot of really excellent tracks. “KNOW ABOUT ME” is very simple by NMIXX standards: the gated wobbly synth kind of just does its thing while the anti-drop chorus is one of the better ones in recent memory, with really effective use of silence. It’s amazing how much mileage this track gets out of a few filter and riser effects. Sullyoon’s first centre part in the choreo goes nuts. Even though it’s as low-key as an NMIXX song gets, Lily still gets a chance to shine without her parts coming across as a forced and unnecessary display of her range. The abrasive descending vacuum-cleaner noises/strings in the dance break and last chorus are such a simple but effective tweak that keep the track feeling fresh until the end.

5. tripleS, “Cameo Love”

I realize this video won’t embed correctly either, but the music video is really good and the choreo might be the best one tripleS had this year. While the goofy oddballs of zenith get to be high school queen bees in their music video, the mysterious oddballs of moon find themselves on the same set but now in a paranoid supernatural thriller. There is of course no way I would leave Sohyun’s unit off of this list (well if they got “Bubble Gum” I would have had to reconsider), but this is probably the best title track tripleS had this year. I like the bridge/dance break a lot. Kaede is such a star when they give her the centre role here. The chorus is good, the arrangement feels genuinely new for tripleS, and the concept is also fresh. Sometimes, left to your own devices, you do start to wonder if you’re even human like the others… Like zenith, underrated members got some shine (Sullin’s low range is very nice). Shion and Jiwoo have always been kind of second choices for main vocals while Dahyun is around but it’s nice that they both got their own units to shine in this time around because their voices have unique qualities of their own.

4. ILLIT, “jellyous”

I think arguments about ILLIT vs NewJeans ¹² are not that interesting, aside from the observation that pretty much all their members got their spots off of performances of girlcrush alpha female type songs on the survival show that formed ILLIT, but wound up doing exclusively cutesy teen girl type music afterwards to chase NewJeans. “jellyous” is really good and shows off a lot of what’s great about ILLIT: the chirpy retro square waves, the carefully practiced playfulness, and the (probably focus-grouped) goofy concepts. Even though they’re basically still rookies, they’re good enough and have enough of an identity to start ripping themselves off, and on Bomb, ILLIT does that pretty well. “Billyeoon Goyangi (Do the Dance)” contains a “do-do-do-” brainworm almost as insidious as the “that-that-that-” from last year’s “Magnetic”, but “jellyous” is definitely their most successful attempt to bottle its spirit. The choreography for this is kind of insane, and apparently the members were basically passing out after performances (working conditions are really bad for k-pop idols and for some reason Korean employers generally don’t seem to believe that the marginal benefit of sleep is higher than working on three hours or less of sleep). I have a theory that the soporific pace of “NOT CUTE ANYMORE” was intended as a bit of an apology to the girls. I like Minju, she’s really cute.

3. NMIXX, “SPINNIN ON IT”

NMIXX’s roster of live vocalists is very good but more important than collecting sopranos is writing songs that can make use singers’ ranges in a somewhat more judicious way than having someone blasting high notes in the background during the chorus ¹³. The falsettos in this song (and the pitched up vocals in the post-chorus) just really work for me. The driving drums make this kind of the perfect followup to “High Horse” (there’s quite a bit of overlap in the writing credits) with all the layers of saxophone and bass built on top, and I wound up liking it a lot better than the actual title track for this release (“Blue Valentine”). I just really enjoyed this track from the first listen, which doesn’t usually happen with NMIXX songs for me.

2. ARTMS, “Icarus”

ARTMS began the year with the X1 teaser, a callback both to the original LOONA X1X teasers pre-[X X] and “Butterfly” (XIIX was shot in Iceland and features Gowon walking around the same wrecked Douglas C-117D). These teasers are some of Jaden Jeong’s best work, and exemplify his best traits as a creative ¹⁴. As Loossemble had failed to find a new company after parting ways with CTDENM, this sparked furious speculation about a potential OT10 comeback, especially since the ending ditty consists of a few notes from the post-“Butterfly” teaser. Those notes teased “Burn”, which Jaden Jeong had planned to be the next title track after “Butterfly”, but he was fired after [X X] sales underperformed. The reformation didn’t happen, and the new teasers turned out to be for the release of “Burn” as an ARTMS single and the Lunar Theory tour, with a setlist mostly consisting of LOONA tracks. This made certain loud “people” (orbits) very upset.

One of the new narratives that spawned in the raging fires of bad faith stan Twitter afterwards was that ARTMS was being totally mismanaged because they weren’t releasing enough music. Now when compared to other groups of the same age this doesn’t really seem to be true (including subunits they released a pretty reasonable amount of music in 2023 and 2024, and in any case making music is an investment and touring is the payday nowadays). All the same I was somewhat disappointed when Club Icarus was announced as an EP rather than a full album like last year’s <DALL>. However, the teasers for Icarus wound up being as good as brilliant as anything else that Jaden and video production agency Digipedi ¹⁵ have done, starting with Haseul’s teaser. It’s almost impossible to imagine any other company promoting a girl group with a visual language as dark as Choerry’s teaser for example. At this point I was pretty sure I was not going to get rug-pulled and as more teasers released, I boldly predicted that ARTMS would release a ten minute music video for a two minute song. Bizarrely enough, that actually happened.

The nearly fifteen-minute long “cinematic version” confirms that ARTMS’s creative team really does think of itself as a group of outsiders. Commercial art in general is a deeply cynical industry, but k-pop may be its most cynical manifestation. Under such conditions, who else would design and approve this messy, claustrophobic short film to promote a girl group? ARTMS supposedly have unusual levels of input into the creative process and they clearly were willing to believe in the vision that Jaden and Digipedi put together. Despite the intrinsically commercial nature of their work, here is a group of people who are willing to, first and foremost, give priority to what they think is cool. While certainly not a coherent work of narrative fiction, the music video does demonstrate the team’s willingness to take risks. Unsurprisingly for an industry defined by its voracious and indiscriminate consumption of inspirations from all sources, the music video pulls from a bewildering list of cultural references - denpa culture, Berlin club aesthetics, private eye films, David Lynch (there’s also a Fire Walk With Me reference in the “Burn” MV) - and processes them into an oblique, abstract gesture at the careers of the ARTMS girls ¹⁶ and, like “Virtual Angel”, the darker aspects of k-pop as a cultural formation. Particularly striking is the hunting scene. The actual “music video” part, the dance scene, is maybe one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve seen on any screen this year because of how simple and unexpected it is. After shooting the “Burn” music video, Seong Won-mo suggested that the industry today is over-obsessed with technique, and the added complexity weighs down the light, fun aspects of creation. The match cuts are not perfect on the fifth or sixth watch, but that doesn’t matter because the first watch is so striking. The rowdy club scene shows a real love and enthusiasm for the utopian promise of the club, in which all dissolve into common experience, with the final shot once again hammering home the singularity of ARTMS. Reborn like a phoenix wing.

1. NMIXX, “High Horse”

I think this was the first k-pop song I heard this year that I felt convinced would make it to any top 10 I made (which I wasn’t really planning on doing). Actually I was pretty convinced early on that it would occupy the top spot, which ended up happening. What starts off as a kind of sappy piano ballad immediately mutates into a heavy, driving breakbeat, before swapping off with, alternately, humming industrial synths and sappy sentimental strings. This hybrid form exemplifies all the best aspects of k-pop as a musical practice, and it’s all knit together by the girls’ confidence in their own voices. Lily is probably the best singer of her generation in the industry but even on the same stage the rest of the girls have no problem keeping up. This track has apparently been bouncing around since 2018, and at this stage in NMIXX’s career it feels like it landed in the perfect spot.

other

Cortis. I have often joked that k-pop needs to take more cues from contemporary US hip hop to make their takes on rap less shitty. Well, HYBE produced a self-produced boy group that rips off Travis Scott and it turns out that also fucking sucks.

idntt. This is Modhaus’s new 24-member boy group. This year they debuted the first 8 with three title tracks. Boytude is the best one, and that bass patch kind of reminds me of yesteryear’s US boy group Brockhampton. Also like Brockhampton, they had a guy get cancelled and removed from the group, fucking up Jaden’s plan of three eight-member units.

rap

jackzebra

This was a productive year for jackzebra, signing with NYC collective Surf Gang and releasing two very long mixtapes, Above and Beyond and Hunched Jack Mixtape, as well as the Keziah-produced people under his jackapplepeople moniker, which has the excellent “追”. Each mixtape has a few highlights and I won’t pretend that every song is good, but it’s kind of interesting how resistant jack is to chasing normal success. It really does seem like he just makes music for himself. Of course it would be untrue to suggest that he is an island onto himself: it’s impossible to imagine that his music could exist without the transnational connections that Soundcloud makes possible (after all the aforementioned Surf Gang is based mostly in New York, keziah is from Lille and that’s not getting into other collaborators like sophitia, cranes, miriamdola, etc etc).

As a result his best songs sound like almost nothing else in rap at the moment. For example, on Above and Beyond his collaborations with chinapoet are totally protean slices of so-called ambient plugg, with “蒙脸” being my favourite on the tape. The unsettling, unresolved chord progressions and slippery beats find jackzebra in a more introspective, meditative mood where he writes some of his most deeply felt lyrics. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have rage bangers of his own (see the bravado of “天空飘来五个字” off Above and Beyond or the rattling bass of “Mosquito”, a love song for the age of ADHD) but that his range is unusually wide, and the occasional unlistenable track is an acceptable price to pay for a glimpse into the furious workings of his mind.

Perhaps the defining moment of his 2025, however, was his On The Radar freestyle. Donning a Givenchy toque and what looks like a gimp mask (I think it’s part of a turtleneck with an integrated ski mask by Japanese brand Doublet from AW19), he proceeds to jerk around without even really pretending to mouth the words to “Givenchy” (a dreary ballad about missed connections that was a real highlight of Hunched Jack Mixtape and 2025 more generally for me), produced by his new Surf Gang comrades evilgiane, eliproperr, and fleadiamonds. This opportunity was arguably a next step up for the careers of various meme rappers like Eric Reprid and Dave Blunts, but in the moment it’s clear that jackzebra doesn’t need it, or perhaps an audience at all, to feel himself.

fakemink

I first heard of fakemink from his collab earlier this year with mechatok and drain gang icon ecco2k, “MAKKA”. Anyways I don’t need to really spill much ink on his meteoric rise this year. I got into him later in the year after a chance conversation with a friend of a friend when I mentioned I liked his feature on “Miss me” by Zukovstheworld (which I happened to come across when I first discovered chinapoet via jackzebra). Like jackzebra, fakemink is also kind of a weird guy who seems a bit aloof from the usual scripts of Soundcloud rap stardom. It’s hard to imagine anybody else from the milieu getting hit by a car on Instagram live and even harder to imagine anybody else having his weirdly zen reaction. His lyric-writing process (as in he actually writes lyrics before recording) also differentiates him from some of his peers and I’d argue makes him one of the best lyricists working today.

The ok-produced banger “Music and Me” has earned comparisons to Bladee’s “My Magic is Strong” due to the music video, but at this stage in his career fakemink definitely feels like the more mature artist compared to 2013 Bladee. This has something to do with the time he spent grinding out music in obscurity as 9090gate but perhaps also has something to do with the fact that he produces many of his own songs and might have a clearer vision of what he wants to sound like as a result. For example, he reused his own verse on “MAKKA” for the self-produced “Snow White”, while “Under Your Skin” is surely the work of an artist in full command of his powers.

loosies

The antipodes. Die! Die! Die!, Royal Headache. The first three tracks of this album by Hu Jia Hu Wei are unbelievably good. I also listened to this song a lot this year.

Asian hip hop, not otherwise specified. Bamsem was a great discovery for me: listened to this EP a lot over the summer. Really lowkey and sparse. Did not have time to track down all the shooting locations in this video while I was in Seoul (if anybody recognizes where the first shot is from that would be great) although I did figure out the coloured lighting at 0:20 is a sculpture at one of the art parks along the Han river.

There is a funny interview with jackzebra while he was visiting New York where he claims “they have so many clones in China like Osamason clone, Nettspend clone, Sematary clone” and even “2hollis clones now”. Well this year he participated in a Chinese underground rap cypher where he comes face to face with Chinese LAZER DIM 700, Chinese Nettspend, and more before delivering perhaps one of the most abstract verses ever performed on a cypher. Afterwards I tried to look up some of the other producers who worked on this cypher and found a Douyin video explaining how to make the beat for jackzebra’s part. The only comment was that the beat was too 抽象.

Chalky Wong is perhaps best known for the f1lthy-produced “Regular Rappers” which happens to be an amazing video as well as auditory experience. This year it got a verse from SEBii and a new video. All Chinese patriots must listen to his “China No. 1” and perhaps also “ABCD” while they’re at it.

kimj spent a lot of time this year hanging out with SEBii, The Deep, and Effie. They got a crazy amount of mileage out of this summer vacation producing numerous tracks and music videos. I’m really partial (unsurprisingly) to this vintage brostep banger featuring jackzebra and SEBii.

This track by Japan’s kegøn with career-best features from Billionhappy and Effie is a noble step towards world peace and the reconciliation of all mankind. Weeaboos may also be interested in this Japanese underground cypher which came out later than the Chinese one but has accumulated like 3 times the views.

Sinophone, not otherwise specified. Thanks Olivia for posting this My Little Airplane song which has become a favourite. Cheer Chen. Pu Shu. 張懸 covering 於是.