Current recommendations: aespa as the most tech pop and generic pop, NewJeans/NJZ as the most condensed bubble pop and tragic story, and i-idle / (g)i-dle as the most provocative and varied.
So I do listen to Kpop. For a while now, but not for a long while really. And I barely scratched the surface of the real Kpop in my taste. But still, I think that this page might be a small intro to the genre (there isn’t one.) And maybe some de-stigmatization and awareness tool?
Anyway, this page is structured by bands I listen(ed) to.
With some structured trivia starting the section, and a more free-form narrative following.
I’ve no idea why Kpop girl groups are called “groups.”
This feels somewhat diminutive to me.
So I tend to call them in a Western-ish way—bands—at least in this post.
(Random fact: in Russia, musical collectives are called “groups” too!)
I also prefer “band member” over “idol,” because the latter implies culturally elevated status.
Most of the bands I listen to are well-known.
But I don’t want to restrict this page’s future.
In case I start to listen to underground Kpop or whatever.
I’m going to write band member names capitalized instead of conventional all-caps.
Because caps is too screaming.
I’ll retain caps in song names and band names for searchability
I don’t listen to them, sorry.
General trends derived from the sections below:
So The Warning is this rock band that you’re invariably going to hear about if you yet didn’t. Daniela (lead vocals, guitar,) Paulina (drums, back/lead vocals,) and Alejandra (bass, back vocals) Villareal from Mexico. Women of the Year according to a dozen of magazines and sites. Close-knit actual sisters. Addictively good at making rock bangers. And the ones having the most devoted fanbase.
That’s why I’m listing them on this page: they have a social media dynamics and image of a proper Kpop girl band. (They aren’t one! They are almost self-produced and were label-less for a long time, as a principle! And they are an actual sister rock band!) A lot of posts. A lot of picking favorites (pick Pau!) among really characteristic sisters. A lot of fan remixes (playlists / live show vids) of their stuff. Listening to The Warning prepared me for the social brain overload that Kpop is.
So I needed something for my mind to chew on when I worked on complex software. In emigration. Fleeing war. Alone. In a freezing cold flat (there was a huge hole in the wall I was unaware of all that time.)
So yeah, BLACKPINK were an extremely cozy and neutral-yet-hyped background for my life back then. Their songs were the most pop-y pop I’ve heard (after Dua Lipa maybe?) So yeah, perfect background noise. (I set a BLACKPINK playlist up while writing this post. I forgot there’s music after half an hour.)
This background-ness is why I mostly stopped listening to BLACKPINK once I explored other Kpop bands. Other than that, they’re good and are the easiest transition from Western pop into Kpop.
So æspa (or simply aespa) started when there was Metaverse and other digital-everything hype. (Which is like, five years ago? Time flies 😰) With a story and a whole series of their (and their Æ avatars’) adventures in virtual world of KWANGYA. This, while sometimes cheesy, was an actual story to watch! And a tech-adjacent one at that! (Discord recently did a profile styling collab with this version of aespa from five years ago, it was that good.)
I started listening to aespa after they abandoned this æ-sthetics (🥁) They are hyper stylish and produce high quality dopamine honeypots still! But yeah, the loss of their creative director (I learned from a random ”Problems with aespa” YouTube video) hit the band somewhat.
If I’d have to recommend only one Kpop band, it will be aespa!
So this band is probably the starkest exemplar of Kpop contradictory nature. NewJeans had the sweetest bubble pop songs all their short career. Like, figuratively, you’re getting chronic diabetes the moment you start listening to them. With the savoriest voices being inseparable from soft instrumentals.
And yet, they didn’t release much, because they tried to sue their label, Ador (sub-company of HYBE.) The label was changing their creative direction and kept mistreating them. Including gross sexualization of band members (then minors!)
They lost several cases (or whatever, I’m bad at this terminology.) With one of the court decisions ruling that “K-pop group members are not classified as workers and are not entitled to labor rights” (citing Wikipedia.) Nasty stuff.
They went rogue, launching an Instagram account (jeanzforfree,) doing streams, and releasing a self-produced song, Pit Stop, under the name NJZ. And then went silent, because the label tightened the screws. To the point of forcing band members back. And terminating Danielle’s contract. Making her family pay millions of won as a label damage compensation. Allegedly because she was the one to start the insurrection.
I want to support and empathize with the girls. Especially Danielle, this rebel soul. But I also am on the fence. I don’t have any anchor to refer to independent NJZ except the Instagram account and the only song they managed to release independently. The rest of them was a carefully moderated label puppeteering. Which is all too characteristic of Kpop.
So I dunno. Listen to them if you feel like bubble pop. And remember the injustice Kpop is built on.
So my Fediverse feed and other communication channels were flooded with Kpop Demon Hunters (KDH) at some point. My YouTube recommendations were always ending with KDH song playlist loops. It was that viral and addictive to people that they were ruining my “shuffle” (with good songs though!) I had to watch the movie.
Didn’t like it one bit. Most characters are barely jotted down. Those characters that are actually written, are not developing. The motivations thus are quite superficial. The graphics are good, but that’s a given for a Netflix movie?
So the only thing worth having from HUNTR/X is “their” songs (Twice the usual Kpop amount scare quotes—they’re animation characters in addition to being an engineered collective of unrealistic beauty standards!) And the songs are goooooooood. So go and give a listen to one of their… four songs?
So I found Cherry Bullet thanks to some curated playlist on YouTube. There were a couple of good songs there, so I was hooked. Not listening to them much now, because there’s almost nothing to listen to. They didn’t release many songs, despite existing for five years.
But the things they released was quite good! On the one hand, I’m happy that there was a band not following crazy comeback-every-quarter tempo. On the other hand, I wish they made more stuff. And didn’t disappear.
But yeah, bands get disbanded in one way or another. In case of Cherry Bullet, the decision was members’ one, not label’s. Which is a rarity in Kpop, because usually it’s labels that decide who to terminate contract with? (See NewJeans’ case.)
BABYMONSTER is the third? band produced by YG Entertainment, home of BLACKPINK. Which is a high bar to clear. And a certain quality guarantee. BAEMON (shortened form of BABYMONSTER) didn’t disappoint even once so far. Their songs are well-produced, the vocal parts flow organically, and rap interjections by Asa and Ruka are something for Western rappers to learn from.
They used to be a seven-person band though. Which is too much if you ask me. Oh they no longer are, right. So the official story is that Rami went on a hiatus for health reasons somewhere in spring 2025. But health concerns are a frequent excuse for Kpop labels to dismiss a band member. So yeah, even YG is not infallible, I guess? Something something corpos.
I don’t listen to BAEMON much lately, because of these rap parts in every song. I’m not really into hip-hop and adjacent phenomena. But I can still recommend BABYMONSTER in case you’re fine with quality rap inclusions!
Just started listening to them, first with “Good Thing” appearing in recommendations. And then seeing (G)I-DLE — Tomboy and (G)I-DLE — Queencard and hyping about these. It’s only after closely watching and listening to both i-dle (“Good Thing”) and (G)I-DLE (the rest.) That I realized these are the same people. The band changed the name just now. And released a banger under a new name.
Then there was this video with (then (G)I-DLE) members singing fragments of most of their singles. And Yuqi (second from the right) is just plain adorable there, almost jumping to rap-like parts and singing passionately. The other members are beautiful, but this girl, she’s got some fire. And freakiness 😉
Oh wait, I just remembered! I actually listened to i-dle before, somewhere in 2020 maybe? When they voiced the virtual Kpop band KDA created by Riot Games. (Pre-aespa virtual worlds, yay!) Kpop and games seem to be quite a match, and many bands above collaborated with game companies. BLACKPING collaborated with PUBG (Mobile). aespa did too. NewJeans collaborated with League of Legends. So i-dle just did the thing, giving their voices to KDA.