Really Cool

STAYC “ASAP”

“ASAP” bounces between sections like tapping through a feed, cycling through cartoonishly boppy pop to rap sections to plaintive balladry every few measures. It all holds together smoothly partly by the logic of feed curation – elements may be different, but there’s an internal logic of aesthetics and taste. All the K-Pop that I enjoy basically works like this, a new variation on the ADHD pop maximalism that was bubbling up in the 2000s and fell out of fashion amongst the cold minimalism that dominated the 2010s. The pendulum is clearly swinging back in favor of this style, and it seems like increasingly like the power of the K-Pop machine is great enough to force pop in general to snap out of its malaise and move towards this sort of energy, if not necessarily the relentlessly cheerful hyperactive genre-mashing of a bop like “ASAP.”

Buy it from Amazon.