Best New Music: November 2025

A ranking and review of the best new music from Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai artists!

View the Substack version of this piece here!

#20: AM8IC, LUKOIE

This new group is laying fertile ground for musical and narrative growth, using a literary breadth that can easily match its future depth. The intro, “Paracosm,” refers to the detailed imaginary worlds children concoct that can remain with them well into adulthood. The song and corresponding album trailer include scripture about the fragility of trust and the intrinsic link between hope and belief. The “Buzzin’” music video drives those lines to a fork in the road between horror and comedy. The members cosplay as Ghostbusters, treat a junkyard as their playground, and fend off mascot-headed foes, all presumably to outsmart the giant spider that is central to both the video plot and the scripture’s meaning. The “Link Up” music video leans more philosophical than spiritual, with time spent in an upside-down realm and surroundings that dissolve with the ripping of a page. The nature of reality is further interrogated on some B-sides, namely “Escher” (presumably a reference to the artist M.C. Escher, whose works contemplate the different ways reality can be perceived) and “LUKOIE” (presumably named after Ole Lukøje, a Hans Christian Andersen character who gives well-behaved children sweet dreams and immoral children nightmares). Although the other songs are relatively generic K-pop ones, the high note flexing in “Link Up” and “Black Moon” and the restless energy of “Buzzin’” are worthy album additions, proving this group has the talent to make staying tuned in to this strange story worthwhile!

#19: ITZY, TUNNEL VISION
Like ITZY’s focus on less-typical framing of well-known words and phrases in past eras (for example, using the phrase “rock and roll” to describe a state of mind instead of a music genre during the Collector era), they imply that having “tunnel vision” is a good thing. They are not too fixated on something; a laser focus allows them to lock in and complete a key task until it is done. This “tunnel vision” helps them capture a magical red light in the album trailer and capture a mysterious bug in the title track’s video. They train the audience to have “tunnel vision,” too. The music video ends with the camera backing up to reveal that all of the action has been watched from the perspective of being inside of a literal tunnel! The viewers have to pass a test of sorts while watching: keep attention on the main plot despite ceaseless light flashes and other distractions! Viewers also have to practice using their new superpower by watching the album teaser videos. One requires them to determine song lyrics with only partial sentences made visible and repeatedly reconfigured. Another teaser video shares song snippets in the form of a hearing and vision test, urging people to wear headphones and focus on the moving shapes. The videos and songs of which the TUNNEL VISION era consists are a clear but clever package deal. The teasers enlist and prepare the audience to activate their superpowers, and by album-listening time, they are ready for the “final challenge” of processing the busy title track music video. Then, the straightforward songs seem even more so; listeners are primed to quickly latch on to the “focus” of each song, staying in whatever mental state an instrumental implies is ideal. 

#18: Aimer, “Little Bouquet” & “Pastoral”
“Little Bouquet” and “Pastoral” are lovely reminders that one need not go far to find happiness and success, as long as one keeps an open and imaginative mind.

A piano melody is at the core of “Little Bouquet,” which likens picking flowers to picking up small memories of what caused happiness - picking up “petals” with which to “decorate [the] future.” “I want you to stay by my side, humming the pleasure[s] of ordinary life,” Aimer wishes. She continues, “[L]et’s go and find the light you have lost.” The music video shows a journey to do so, through a lovably kitschy homage to The Wizard of Oz. 

While “Glinda” imparts wisdom in “Little Bouquet,” a different witch does as she teaches magic to a young boy in “Pastoral.” Backed by soft snapping and acoustic guitars, the song gently encourages someone to revive an imaginative spirit: “[L]et’s open the box… and share the dreams we packed inside;” “Let’s go searching, to the rhythm of a whistle.” The young wizard and his teacher do indeed go searching for dreams to fill his gift box. His literal reaching for the stars eventually succeeds, and a star takes its rightful place in his box. His other big dream - to fly - proves harder to achieve. However, after falling asleep beside his broomstick, he experiences literal dreams come true. He flies among the hand-drawn clouds, a hokey yet heartfelt visual for the songs’ shared “no place like home” statement. 

#17: TRiDENT, BLUE DAWN
In under 20 minutes, this J-rock band makes a cogent case for never surrendering. They start with “Reimei no Uta,” insisting that fear and “frozen thoughts” are the only true obstacles to a brighter “NEW ERA.” They commit to extending that era in “MIRACRAID,” which involves a lyric change from singing about walking somewhere despite being unable to see the final destination to running somewhere despite still not seeing it. “MIRACRAID” further speaks to the members’ rising faith in themselves with its climax suitability; it increases its use of electronic elements. The anime tie-in song that follows “MIRACRAID,” “Koi no Magic Potion,” dials back that emphasis again, which avoids obscuring their main argument for showing courage: “If there is no light, become a light.” They are “guided by these hands that save someone” and want to become the helping hands that save someone else. They are loud and proud as they take it upon themselves to lead a new “Miracle Potion Generation," a cohort that finds solidarity and fulfillment in challenging themselves when motivated by the thought of positively inspiring each other. 

After succinctly sharing their mission statement - that they should be brave so that others are inspired to be brave - the group puts their words into action, blazing their own unique trail, by ending BLUE DAWN with an inventive take on “TAKE ME HOME COUNTRY ROADS”!

#16: eill, ACTION
ACTION uses a movie production metaphor to reflect on how unreal being lovestruck can feel. After energizing listeners with her typical retro-pop flair on the title track, eill pairs the metaphor with surprisingly subdued instrumentals. The simplistic “what am i made for?” and “last scene.” question who she is outside of her partner in crime - a partner who is a mere character, rather than a full-fledged person, as seen in the corny spy caper that is the “ACTION” music video. The “ACTION” lyrics describe the “climax” of finding her “kindred spirit” as “[s]urpass[ing] reason,” an exhilarating emotional jolt, but a sugar high that wears off quickly. She gushes about love again in “Love, lala ~Koi no Yukue~,” but she is back to focusing on how lost she feels when it comes to knowing herself and feeling complete on her own in “NEEMIA.” At the end, in “fortnight,” she decides to “put away [her] memories with” her former “co-star” and dream up new “movies” to cast herself in: “I fell asleep and started running.”

ACTION is fronted by a nimble tune, but it benefits from dissolving after that into something more stripped and candid. eill contemplates how much of a public presentation is “all an act” and does so through songs that let her voice - her literal and metaphorical one - make starring appearances in ways previously unseen.

#15: Jessi, P.M.S.
Jessi touts her high status not just for the heck of it, but to prove it is possible to achieve without compromising one’s identity. She owns her potentially off-putting traits in “Girls Like Me” (“Yeah I curse, yeah I’m loud!”), she sings about staying true to her roots in “Brand New Boots” (“I got Seoul in my sneakers”), and she shows appreciation for all of her attitudes with the EP’s title (“P.M.S.” stands for “Pretty Mood Swings”). Her desire to “keep it real” means not sticking to ego-centric raps, and when she slows down and shows off serious singing skills in “HELL” and “Marry Me,” her “I feel like a mess” admissions come across as honestly as her “Don’t mess with me” phases do. Jessi keeps the “real talk” coming with the corresponding music videos, which encourage people to disregard any claims made about her that come from other sources. In “Newsflash,” she says, “Don’t believe all the hype… I don’t read what they type,” and she interacts with paparazzi and media, but only when it is on her own terms. In “Girls Like Me” Jessi again makes sure to show people who she is so others do not fill a vacuum with rumors. Her wardrobe is wide-ranging, the scenes include both pose-heavy and dance-heavy ones, and people pour over an issue of The Global Times with a Jessi-themed cover story that has a presumably self-selected headline about her baddie status! Jessi’s songs and videos alike send this message: “If you didn’t hear it directly from me, ignore it! Let me and me alone tell you who I am!,” and she does so while checking off all kinds of stylistic boxes.

#14: NONT TANONT, MONO / SPECTRUM
NONT TANONT’s gorgeous voice gets to shine on soulful ballads and R&B/pop songs alike, and the types of love songs he sings change enough to further evade monotony. Some breakup songs (“The Collection,” “If Only,” “Unsaid”) express feeling resigned, giving up on trying to make a relationship work. Other songs (“BADLY,” “Fallin,’” “Dopamine”) celebrate the lovestruck phase that precedes an extra-painful breakup. The most particular chord is struck by the song “Temple Dogs,” which has quite a chill vibe for a song about an ultimate form of unrequited love: a celebrity crush (“In the end, I have to be heartbroken… In love with the person on the screen”)! Whether mourning a love that is gone or one that can never even begin, NONT TANONT regularly circles back to one reminder: to cherish every second one has with a loved one, since no one can know which of those seconds will be the last. This sentiment is most overt in “Time Flies” (“I want to be sure I won’t regret a single second”) and “Afterglow” (“Look at the hands of the clock, every second is meaningful”). The latter proves NONT TANONT saves the best for last, ending the album with the fullest sonic blend and some of the most amusing lyrics (he rebrands “sinking” in love to just being an “expert at falling”)!

#13: Grizzly, Flower Shop4
These songs form one overarching musical metaphor. Whether favoring a band-style sound (like in “An Ordinary Day (haru)”), fast pop-rock (“Shooting Star”), or a rock ballad (“Endless Summer”), Grizzly sticks to the passing seasons as his primary topic. He tends to his memories with the kind of gingerness that gardeners employ when tending to their plants. He treats memories as frail enough to blow in the wind and finds contentment in knowing they will fly back towards him eventually, since the seasons are cyclical. He characterizes wind as the vehicle for moving memories and analogizes springtime to the success of that memory-handling process. “Every moment was scattered,” he sings in “Blind Love;” “This sorrow… Scatters softly with the breeze,” he sings in “An Ordinary Day (haru);” “The warm wind blows… Gather all the scattered pieces,” he sings in “Dear me.” And in “Endless Summer,” he reassures himself, “Even if it blows away in the wind / It’s okay now…  It’s a season that will repeat itself.” He concludes with “Home” (when considering “The Sun and the Sea” to be more of a thematic epilogue), which beautifully describes catching the memory fragments that blow back his way and putting them into the bare-bones foundation of the house he is building, not just to reside there but to have a place where he can sing for and with his lover. The couple plans to sing together on the “[o]ld furniture [that] has memories” in every cushion and chair leg, and to cherish every lyric with which they get to harmonize, using “[b]eautiful languages… as a staircase.” Flower Shop4 tells a sweet story about making a house a home in ways that come as naturally as breathing.

#12: TOMONARI SORA, East West 
As the title suggests, East West is a spirited selection of songs that stir the sounds of Eastern and Western cultures together. A few tracks prioritize ambiance, like “Coffee - Album ver.” and “white out,” but the majority contain sprightly storytelling. The best songs are the ones easiest to visualize, “HOKO” and “Yoimatsuri.” The former brings to life a fight scene (making its purpose as an anime tie-in song a natural one), complete with battle cries, stomping, sword clashes, and the noises of weapons being unsheathed. As for “Yoimatsuri,” its sing-song nature and buoyancy set the right tone for his description of a midsummer festival. Elsewhere on the album, TOMONARI SORA sets and changes tones in continuously riveting ways. Theatricality threads the songs together, with plentiful playful pianos, clap-along moments, and creative characterizations (especially in “Niramekko,” which compares crushing to a staring contest, wondering who will “blink” first)!

#11: JAURIM, LIFE!
This album assertively grabs “LIFE!” by the handles, with a mood that is often macabre, melodramatic, and unflinching in its reveling in devilish delirium! The stakes sound as dire as they come, as they sing about immortal evils, the “dirty games” of this “cruel” and “cold” world, and the inability to be “dancing” through life so much as “writhing” through it! Besides those lyrics from “LIFE!,” other songs that sound drastic include “LET IT DIE” (“The final hour to save the world”) and “KARMA” (“Crying in the pouring rain alone / Shedding tears of blood upon the stone”). Bouts of jubilation are expressed just as intensely. They describe triumph over the world’s evils in the song named after the goddess of wisdom and warfare, “ATHENA,” and they describe a victory celebration in the song named after the Roman god of wine, “BACCHUS.” Other songs are bound by scary-story ties more than mythological ones. For example, “MY GIRL” warns someone to run while she still can from a “mad man.” Lyrics like “The darkness was always dazzling” and “The vampire who loved me” make “VAMPIRE” appear to be from the point of view of that girl they have been warning. Then, in “COALTAR HEART,” they repeat the phrase “my girl” and reference “sinking down” into darkness. Whether they are referring to someone else or themselves ‘“sinking” into a relationship with a vampire, the songs are bound by a creepy and curious nature! This band also holds attention via instrumental choices, compounding the impulse to keep listening with frequent guitar solos, some atypical verse and chorus structures, and multiple outros akin to repeating incantations! These rockstars never do anything halfway, and their sound continues to stand alone in the ways it goes all-in on morbid and mythical scene-setting.

#10: Jeff Satur, Red Giant
At first, there appear to be miles between the rebellious “Ride or Die,” the sultry “Passion Fruit,” the vengeful “Tell Me The Name,” the warm and romantic “Golden Night,” and the pop ballad “Call it over.” But beneath the surface, the singles released earlier in 2025 and the brand-new songs alike nod to each other. This is not thanks to main topics or video plots as much as the little details. Jeff Satur’s hardened expression in the “Tell Me The Name” video is as apparent as his warmth is in “Golden Night,” and his morose manner when singing some songs is as believable as his melancholy or merry one in others. The violent and criminal premise of “Ride or Die” is not what makes it memorable; it’s the piercing look in his eyes and the “getting away with it” smirk on his face at the end. “Tell Me The Name” would not be a particularly memorable “damsel in distress” story were it not for brief hints at the motive, in the form of a somewhat-blurry piece of paper held in a gauze-covered hand. And in “Golden Night,” the Christmastime romance is moving because of its cute montage of flustered mishaps over extravagant dates.

Like how the music videos owe their emotional effectiveness to the moments between plot hinge points, the songs on Red Giant owe their lasting impacts to underhanded connecting of dots. The pre-released “Tell Me The Name” now sounds like foreshadowing, with lyrics about a “bitter and sweet” taste and running from a feeling that paraphrase the lyrics in the new song “Passion Fruit.” “Golden Night” latches onto a key word from “Passion Fruit” - “sometimes” - with its message that “sometimes, miracles happen twice.” (It underlines that statement by appearing twice on the album, once in Thai and once in English!) Another example of foreshadowing is the line “sometimes it’s sour truth” in “Tell Me The Name,” which brings to mind not just the new song “Passion Fruit” but the “sometimes” key word in “Golden Night.”

Each part of Red Giant manages to be both separate from and subtly connected to the other ones, proving Jeff Satur gives irreplaceable performance both vocally and otherwise.

#9: Nasi Li, “Burn To Ashes”
This rock ballad handles its movement well. Nasi Li’s voice echoes and returns to full strength whenever her resolve does, and finishing touches - like a quiet moment with just her voice and piano during the bridge, and an octave jump in the second verse - rise to the occasion of taking leaps of faith. It is a song about finding one’s own voice in more ways than one, just like the music video, which has amiability that would not exist without its absurdity and vice versa! There appear to be two main characters in it (although Nasi Li repeatedly sees the other one’s reflection in the mirror, so one interpretation is that the other character is simply an alter ego). Nasi Li looks “normal” while spending time in public with someone who wears misapplied makeup and a costume covered in plush toys. She takes up a lot of literal space because of her thick and voluminous outfit, but as more and more people take toys off of it, she looks like she is shrinking. People just assume her trinkets are up for grabs, and she doesn’t correct them. She either lets them take them or hands them over herself, and either way, it is to get them to go away and stop gawking. The world Nasi Li and the costumed person spend an afternoon in together is one where passersby fall into two categories: mocking onlookers and thieves who strip the costumed girl for parts.

Once the costumed girl has zero trinkets left, she lies on a dressing room floor beside Nasi Li, who takes the hair pin out of her hair and wears it herself, triggering the vanishing of the costumed girl. What makes Nasi Li different from the other object-takers, though, is that Nasi Li gave that hair pin to her in the first place; she gave the costumed girl a gift upon going from fearing to befriending that “monster.”

At the end, someone in a music store who remains partially off-camera flips a “NO FREAKS ALLOWED” sign to the side that says “BE YOURSELF.” Like Nasi Li’s role, this unidentified person could be anyone. Besides a gawker or a bully, there is a third option for who to be when faced with someone unfamiliar: a kind person who treats the “other” as an equal. Having made someone feel fully human and included, Nasi Li can rest much easier than others. Nasi Li learns to like someone, while selfish people learn to only like parts of someone. 

“Burn To Ashes” shows how anyone is capable of seeing the goodness within another person, and the video is an off-kilter yet insightful analysis of how people do or do not differentiate between types of sentimentality: seeing a person whose memory causes someone to feel sentimental versus seeing an object to which a person assigns sentimental value. 

#8: Ryokuoushoku Shakai, “My Answer”
These songs are stronger together and share a moral of the story: because the quality of ups in life surpasses the quality of the downs, the larger quantity of downs is irrelevant. In short, taking chances is always worth it.

In “My Answer,” the sounds move in spirals, circling back but not quite touching the same bases as earlier. Instrumentals and vocals alike start and stop again and again, while the band sings about how life often halts them in their tracks but always puts them back on a smoother path eventually. As much as “Happiness comes with a cruel shadow, eerily clinging,” were they to get a do-over, they would still make the same choices leading to that caveated happiness: “I look back and realize that even the difficult days brought me happiness… I’m choosing you again and again.” Implicit in their “Don’t sweat it” mentality is also a “Don’t overthink it” one, shown in the music video. A young girl grows increasingly confused and overwhelmed, as she goes from facing a single door, to multiple doors in a line, to a whole circle of doors. She subsequently finds a trap door, a tiny door, doors lined up as if to form their own hallway, a door that drops her into the ocean, and more. Regardless of her relative calmness or fear level, there is always at least one door available to her, and that is all that matters. Given the fact she is in black-and-white scenes (until her final one) and Ryokuoushoku Shakai’s scenes are in color, the video implies the representative of their younger selves should rest easy knowing that the choices that feel so black-and-white now will not always feel that way. The “answer” is not multiple choice or “True or False;” there not only can be more than one right answer, but the only wrong answers are those that are labeled as such. Any choice is better than no choice, so the young girl just needs to pick any door. Likewise, Ryokuoushoku Shakai need not be cowed by the cons that come with the pros of their decisions, because the greatest con of all would be conning themselves out of making a decision in the first place.

The B-side, “Samonakuba Darega Yaru,” has the same combination of message consistency and instrumental whiplash, with a seesawing between loud bursts of courage and quiet periods of hesitation. Regardless of how long it takes or how many times fear blocks them, they continue to assert that a “Many will enter, few will win” society is still worth being a part of: “Sure, there are sacrifices… it’s not so bad;” “High risk and low return, of course it’s like that.”

With the grandiosity and gravity it deserves, Ryokuoushoku Shakai’s songs deliver the message that life is a “greater strengths than struggles” experience, with “greater” not necessarily meaning “larger quantity.” What makes life “great” is living it, which they encourage their younger selves to do in ways that are simple yet speak volumes.

#7: Awich, Okinawan Wuman
Awich makes her autobiography accessible, but only to a point. She shares her story while routinely transitioning to an “Enough about me” stance, letting collaborators talk about the bigger picture and what can be gleaned and broadly applied from her personal experiences. She also balances privacy with openness well thanks to descriptive yet brief interludes. The skits sound like different conversations with different people in different settings have been copied and pasted together, becoming a hodgepodge of overlapping comments that might make no sense to listeners but can trigger precise memories for Awich.

The album has plenty of broad-strokes commentary about sanctimonious leadership, materialism, and speaking truth to power. But it also gets more personal, especially in “A Woman Hung Up.” It recounts Awich’s past hardships, from coming to America with “a dollar and a dream,” to having Asian slurs hurled at her, to raising a child as a young widow and a single mom on food assistance. She addresses a morally bankrupt person from her past as follows: “Remember? / All the letters you wrote me? / You told me / To keep writing… tell the / Whole world my story.” And that is what she does, and her pen and voice are her strongest defensive weapons. She certainly does not express guilt over having a chip on her shoulder, but she turns that chip into a piece of her armor, rather than throwing it at those who have wronged her. In other words, the album has some mildly vengeful notions but puts greater importance on using past struggles for growth and inspiration. Both Awich and her collaborators speak to the desire to inspire countless times. For example, on “Fear Us,” Joey Bada$$ raps, “What are we supposed to fight the power with?... Use my mind like a weapon, [that’s] all it is.” And “Full Circle (Skit)” wraps up the story as follows: “Full-circle moment, the cipher complete. Hip-hop is the force that unites us indeed.” RZA’s evident production style heightens this sense of wanting to make useful contributions to hip-hop history.

Okinawan Wuman means something to Awich that might differ from what it is supposed to mean to everyone else, and that speaks to her finesse at balancing bite with Zen commentary that can be universally appreciated and applied.

#6: Stray Kids, DO IT
There have never been very tight strings attached when it comes to Stray Kids’ self-hype, but their confidence is even less ambiguous than usual! While merging old and new styles in terms of both music and aesthetics, they boast of creating a whole “new culture” with their music - “THAT NEW POP,” as they put it in “DIVINE”! “It’s exhausting, the law[s] of this world, and our path is different,” they assert, and that path involves a language all their own, which includes verbalizing the sounds of traditional Korean drums in “Do It”! There is an abundance of examples of these bold-faced attempts to not just play a game by their own rules, but a game of their own making. 

After coming in hot with the scalding and scolding “Do It” and the old-school boom-bap “DIVINE,” the latter boasting about being “giants on the stage,” Stray Kids do confess to feeling burdened by their high status, pleading for a vacation in “Holiday” and singing about wistfulness in “Photobook.” However, it would not be a Stray Kids release without a big bounce back, and the album ends back on a high with “Do It (Festival Version)”! The quickness with which Stray Kids resume full confidence after stumbles is also borne out in the “Do It” and “DIVINE” music videos. They blend formats (with a mix of live-action and ink-drawn scenes) and genres (with aspects of comedies, action movies, and even historical fiction) while emphasizing the speed and efficiency with which they shake the world. All it takes in “Do It” are waves of their arms to trigger scene transitions, blur surroundings, or morph the screen’s borders into new shapes. Also in “Do It,” flashes of light are all they need to make a close-up image multiply or to make a scene look entirely transformed. In “DIVINE,” all they need is some wind to get their superpowers working. They flex their speed and ease of switching things up at a meta level, too, with the “Do It (Overdrive Version)” video. All they need to catch and hold attention is a backyard setting and a few basic props. With cartoonish sprinting, sharks in the pool, and tons of other anomalies, their mission to “overdo it” is clearly and quickly accomplished! 

DO IT is a last hurrah for Stray Kids’ 2025 that is a case in point when discussing their soaring success and earned egos.

Read the rest here!