Best New Music, Part Four

August’s best releases from Korean and Japanese artists!

View the Substack version of this piece here!

Read about No. 20-11 here!

#10: Picheolin, 吉BOARD(Gilboard)
While DINO’s alter ego used to only sporadically pop up during SEVENTEEN stages, the larger-than-life Picheolin now has the full and proper introduction he deserves! Not only is the character expanded on in the natural and colorful ways fans had hoped for, but Picheolin re-introduces himself in ways that only make sense coming from him. The broader-strokes ways of leaning into nostalgia (in both aesthetic and musical ways) come with personal finishing touches. The album packaging itself comes in USB, cassette tape, magazine, and CD formats, and the USB version taps into a current trend at the same time, with its ability to be used as a bag charm. The songs draw heavily from previous decades, but some include “cameos from DINO,” and one song even shouts out SEVENTEEN’s fandom name debut and band debut dates! Not to mention DINO’s writing credit on every track, and Picheolin’s catch phrases (“ZZAN!” and “Eyes of love!”) in song after song.

Both the music videos and lyrics reiterate how Picheolin always assumes the solution is more Picheolin! “Everybody wants me,” “Ta-da! Here I am!,” and “making the whole world roar with laughter,” he exclaims in “ZZAN”! “Age is just a number; I’m still super famous,” he brags in “Party Rock Rock,” while encouraging people to “Shake it all around, just like my booty”! Picheolin comes across as an overbearing party guest who some might try to avoid, but he has a childlike naivety and emotional authenticity that make him a less off-putting party guest! He treats everything as the reason for a celebration, and even the biggest cranks cannot help but be entertained by this entirely un-self-conscious, gregarious attention magnet!

In an album pre-release video, Picheolin introduces himself as a hero across eras ranging from prehistoric to futuristic! In the “Party Rock Rock” video, he wins over people young and old and gets a crowd to dance with him, despite his tacky getup and obvious indicators his presence is not initially seen as a gift to everyone! 

In “Mi-cheo Mi-cheo,” he plays an overeager taxi driver, takes a couple through a car wash that he treats more like a rave (while in quite an eyesore of a decorated cab, no less!), and gets over-involved in various love lives. 

Even his version of a bad mood is relatively can-do! In “Love Sick,” he nurses breakup pain while taking himself out on a movie date and driving around at night with his shades still on; his view is essentially, “I’ve still got it!” 

#9: KiiiKiii, WhyKiiiKiii
As detailed previously, this girl group represents a collapse and combination of sonic, visual, and cultural timelines. They maintain the aesthetic of an earlier internet era but use the language and inscrutable degree of earnestness employed by Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The results remain similar to those of the Delulu Pack and UNCUT GEM eras: an early-aughts sound and a look that conveys awareness of being constantly watched, having grown up in a digital-first world. Lyrics like “No filter, 4K, baby!” (“Pop Off Pop Off”) and “Aren’t I cute right now?” (“Candy Pink Magic Hole Flip Phone” — an even more Mad Libsian song than usual for them!) reveal the centrality of social media to KiiiKiii’s self-perceptions. The nature of their music is not a critique of the culture so much as a radical acceptance of it. If their daily life is like being on a stage or screen, they might as well embrace who they are and enjoy the attention! The “always on” state of mind is less daunting when considering they are experiencing it mutually, something people are implicitly reminded of every time they talk like besties more than idols. For example, they affectionately talk about the Zodiac as if reading horoscopes in private together in “Candy Pink Magic Hole Flip Phone”: “Unnie, listen to me… I'm lookin' into your eyes, I see Scorpio in them.” And they repeatedly prioritize having fun living in the moment regardless of how “uncool” it might look to outsiders. They try to coin their own hip phrases, like “KiiiKiii bring you magic meow” (“Pop Off Pop Off”) and “I'm a Kiii to the Kiii, I know you love me” (“Candy Pink Magic Hole Flip Phone”), and songs about living for today (“Ever2Late!,” “Pop Off Pop Off”) speak to how life online is inescapable, so why not make the most of it?!

Perhaps the most apt representation of the juxtaposition between a fixation on posting and on fully living in the present is the song “Hey Hi.” They sing, “Obsessed with life / My cool alarm, the delulu track / We’re on [a] perfect vibe / Relaxing tea time.” “Delulu” is both Gen Z slang and a reference to their own EP, Delulu Pack. The “tea time” is a nod to the random tea party scenes amid more outdoor-suited ones in the “I DO ME” music video. Then and now, they plop details that convey relaxed and childlike qualities into surroundings and sentiments that convey the opposite: attempts to “act cool” and embrace chaos! They had a tea party during an activity-filled series of adventures in “I DO ME,” and they mention one now during a fast-paced track about living life with gusto, and that juxtaposition shows they have to create their own definition of a “moment of Zen” in this chaotic world. That is the self-defined moment they deem a “perfect vibe.” 

The bottom line is that KiiiKiii know they need no permission to draw and change the contours of their lives. A tool for doing so is literally in their hands!

#8: Lonesome_Blue, FOURTH DIMENSION (+2)
These relentless rockstars flex a keen ear for melodic and metal-derived music that makes the most of every moment, and new guitarist Sally proves to be a seamless addition. With the exception of the strange outlier “Will-o’-the-wisp,” Lonesome_Blue’s attitude is boundlessly bright. They sing about everything feeling possible in an improbable number of ways, insisting that the future is theirs for the taking and the customizing, that everyone deserves to cherish an inner child and related inner flame, and that all are entitled to refuse to snuff out what’s “sparkling inside” them! At the same time as they stay on that page, they switch things up sonically, always seemingly entertaining themselves as much as the audience! They are always playing games with and challenging themselves. The vocals and drums race each other in “Break the Limit,” the one-upping contest is between vocals and guitar-shredding in “Reason To Be,” and songs like “Blue Canvas” pull off textured balancing acts. In “ALIVE!,” they achieve the perceived goal of sustaining ceaseless momentum, partly thanks to incorporating a live-crowd recording. In “New Breed,” they decide to see if they can catch an electronic curveball thrown at them mid-song. And in the bonus tracks, they narrate stories outside of their own. (The special guests on “TOUGH BOY” make that one especially enjoyable.) The overarching theme is “Go for it!,” and the band proves more than capable of representing that.

#7: ENHYPEN, THE SIN : BLISS 
A very thorough breakdown of ENHYPEN’s music video universe can be read here, and the shortest way to summarize THE SIN : BLISS is that it picks up right where the last era leaves off. There is still remarkable loyalty to the lore, and everything from the lyrics to the video antics stays aligned with the narrative about on-the-lam vampires with egos that are not entirely unearned! They continue to evade capture and make a mockery of the authorities and media outlets who insist they won’t get away for much longer! They are experts at staying one step ahead and making mortals look foolish. After all, what better way to hide in plain sight than to cosplay as businessmen, which they do in a series of commercials?! The ads are for vampire-targeting items, including coffin-shaped mattresses, a real estate company that sells light-blocking homes, a teeth bloodstain remover, and a bank where the staff are immortal (“Tired of your account manager changing again and again? At Midnight Bank, things are different. Your wealth is managed by experts who never die”)! The entire group stars in a seventh ad, for an Amazon-like service called ROUTE. The final touch: a 1-8000 number instead of a 1-800 one! The ROUTE ad is the most taunting one. These vampire fugitives will even come right to your doorstep and still not get caught, like they haven’t been for not hundreds, but thousands of years!

Viewers might think, “Wait, the vampires were caught, since they’re in jail now,” but it isn’t that simple! While they spend some time in a jail in the “Bloody Paradise” music video, they ditch the uniforms for escape-ready athleisure; they break out of there, busting walls and jumping over fences; and they make a mockery of their arrests, laughing and playing with their undone handcuffs once they’re out. The “Checkmate” video comes across as similarly snickering.

As for the music itself, while THE SIN : VANISH is admittedly more enjoyable, taking the form of an investigative podcast for which the songs are like interludes, THE SIN : BLISS still shares that “Not a second to spare” energy. The members run and hop from pop-rock (“Two Fools”), into auto-tune-heavy hip-hop (“Stuck”), Brazilian Funk (“Bloody Paradise”), EDM (“Checkmate”), and then a more retro kind of hip-hop (“Highlight”). That last track puts a meta period on this chapter; they compare their relationships to highlight reels. Like the picture frame they appear behind for a split second in the “Bloody Paradise” video, making it look like they are in a TV show, the allusion to putting on a show underscores that when it comes to ENHYPEN, audiences are always in for another bloody good mystery!

#6: NCT 127, BLINGY
NCT 127 are defined by their idiosyncrasies, and it serves them well to show those off loudly and proudly, especially with just five members (others having exited the group or gone off to fulfill mandated military service). Each of the five members this time can be a more three-dimensional character, and while everything about this comeback is noisy, the core chemistry among the five doesn’t get lost. The synergy is less tangled now — in some ways! They spend parts of the music videos at each other’s throats and other parts teaming up or showing brotherly love, showing in full what it means to be someone’s “ride or die”! 

Text on the screen for a nanosecond during the “Piñata” music video says this: “Choose life… Choose your crew. Choose getting lost. Choose getting into trouble… Choose scraped knees. Choose the noise. Choose loud nights… loud music… Choose taking the blame. Choose climbing fences. Choose to keep moving. Choose memories. Choose the people who stayed.” That is what the BLINGY era comes down to: choosing to work hard, play hard, fall hard, and win hard, handling times of tension and camaraderie like a fearless band of antiheroes! 

This era’s videos have both a party premise and a heist one. When they are not seeking and attaining all the embellished items they can get their hands on, they are still flexing A-list credentials. HAECHAN even stops mid-heist to sign an autograph! While five healthy egos in the same space with the same wants naturally causes problems, feel-good moments (like when they grab a bite to eat together or bandage each other’s wounds, despite probably being responsible for those wounds in the first place!) cut the tension and remind everyone to not let pettiness jeopardize a wildly fun time! That wildness imbues the album itself, which has some more palatable pop (like “Step Up” and “Getaway”) but favors the bold and the brash.

127-isms are mostly for acquired tastes, but a more crowd-pleasing and amusing aspect to the group’s “Choose Everything” default is thanks to the “Call 127” video series. Morals of the story include the following: “[G]ossip is like a comic book” (the topic of HAECHAN’s episode), “‘Final price’ is an interesting phrase. The price stays the same, only you feel cheaper” (JAEHYUN’s observation when trying to cut a deal), “There are two kinds of people at the movie[s]: those who buy popcorn and those who don’t, [and] no one knows who loves movies more” (TAEYONG’s remarks), and more. The clips include a performative patina of intellectualism, showing how they want to be taken seriously, but never too seriously! After all, the sixth “Call 127” episode shows all five members together in a movie theater, as if all of the lessons they just taught were just their fictional characters messing with people! 

#5: TAEMIN, PHASE 1 : Soft Violence 
With evocative visuals and vocal inflections, TAEMIN embodies a relationship that hurts more than one with a swift and sudden ending ever could. Instead, he reveals how much more gruesome it is when a relationship does not come off like a bandage, when remnants of it stubbornly cling to him in ways from which he cannot distract himself or forget their presence. It feels more manageable to cope with something like “pain” or “a breakup” than something that is harder to define. The toxic afterlife of a bad relationship is what TAEMIN sings about, staying true to his typical style of having neither standard love songs nor standard breakup ones. He remains more interested in something in between, and that “something” is represented through visuals and lyrics that are meant to be unsettling. The concept videos zoom in on all things stretchy, squishy, and squeamishness-inducing, and the album cover has a similar look. The “FLOAT” music video focuses on liquid symbolism, with what happens next controlled by the presence of blood, paint, ink, rain, and more. He describes the ways his relationship makes him feel stuck by comparing it to a “Gooey” substance (in both “Gooey” and “1004,” the latter being about feeling stuck in a memory), portrays the relationship’s impact as a rotting appendage (in “Frankenstein” and “SKIN”), and illustrates the relationship’s invasiveness in “SKIN” (“Old skin on my sleeves / Funny how it clings”) and “PARASITE” (“You took the life out of me… I can’t believe that I let you get inside”). Everything about this era is slippery: the lens through which he sees himself (which explains why he calls himself a monster in “Frankenstein,” a puppet in “PARASITE,” and alien-compatible in the “FLOAT” video), his surroundings (his location in “This Is The End” suddenly goes from a movie theater to a subway car and back again), and his mental state (hence the recognition of his relationship’s toxicity that comes and goes in waves throughout the album). 

Current reality and the ways the past clings to it are the scariest horror show of all, largely due to a lack of knowledge or control. Rather than knowing how the “script” ends, people have to live with not knowing, which can trigger the sense that something untoward is stirring, due to being frightened by the lack of specifics. TAEMIN offers an alternative view of what constitutes a truly “gory” and “graphic” image, which suits his preference for symbolizing relationships in ways that are neither postmortems nor premonitions. A former flame is now a nebulous, gnawing substance. 

PHASE 1 : Soft Violence is an audiovisual exhibit that artfully attests to the trauma of tension, of the sources of friction that make it hard to “float” through life.

#4: Zior Park, F2026
Zior Park’s characters have always been ironic experiments in self-discovery; rather than try on different hats to find out which fit him best, he tries them on to find out which don’t. He is always in process-of-elimination mode, and the F2026 era reveals a frightening dead end. What if there is nothing left to eliminate? Who is he without his characters? 

Zior Park’s WHERE DOES SASQUATCH LIVE? PART 2 era is worth revisiting in detail to fully appreciate F2026. A song from that era called “BYE BYE BYE” remains especially relevant: “I’m numb and dumb… You can leave whenever you want.” That line sums up both that song and F2026, which are both about someone who feels abandoned, empty, and better off for it (or at least trying to convince himself he is better off turning off his feelings). Because attachments cause trouble, Zior Park shares a revealing anecdote about some advice he got to dodge them: “My dad once told me, ‘Trust nobody / Be a fisherman, keep your net hidden / You’ll be fine if you have the bait / Nothing’s free; you always need to pay / Use them all, don’t be friends with them, son…’” He later remarks, “I thought he was a cold-blooded dude / But now I get why he said all that.” 

Throughout F2026, Zior Park goes back to calling himself and life in general “numb” and “dumb,” it being a dog-eat-dog world where relationships are faked or used first and foremost for selfish ends. He sings about everyone leaving him again (like on “BYE BYE BYE”) and having normalized his loneliness in “Dead Channel”: “Dead channel, no one’s home;” “I’m receiving nothing through / Just a frequency of you.” He sings again about what is “Dumb” to him in the song of the same name. He revisits the “Live life like the fisherman, not the bait” advice in “ADHD,” complaining that he did not do so (“you sank the hook”). He even nods to the “cold-blooded dude” comment, with an iguana as his audience in the “Dead Channel” music video! 

The album featuring “BYE BYE BYE” ends with a monologue called “THE END,” which says in part: “The man realized that what he was looking for all this time has now all become meaningless. His search to find the unimaginable was overshadowed by the process itself. That does not mean he’s going to give up looking… but the people and things he met during his search have become more precious to him. After this realization, he returned to his home, where everyone welcomed him with love and joy as the beloved naughty boy.” Nothing mattered in that era’s audiovisual journey as much as the realization that people in Zior Park’s life gave him a welcoming place to call “home.” Now, in F2026, the concept of “home” remains top of mind: “Dead channel, no one’s home” (“Dead Channel”); “I just want to bring you home” (“Angel”); “Every time I see you at home, is it alright to feel this joy?” (“Neuralyzer”).

Another aspect of the “BYE BYE BYE” era worth another look is the “BULLET” music video. It features a party atmosphere with the opposite of party-ready music, and F2026’s “Dead Channel” video features the opposite of a party atmosphere with party-ready music! This inversion supports Zior Park’s ongoing argument that clothes do not make the man; images are not what they seem. As he sings in F2026’s “Dumb,” “Suit and tie don't make you make sense / You're just a fraud in a better-looking sentence”! Things feel hollow because labels are arbitrary — he calls both the room and “your words” “empty” in “BYE BYE BYE” — which is why he feels so desperate in “Angel,” singing, “You took the light, you took the wings / And left me with these hollow things.” It is also why “ruins” is the defining word for “Dead Channel.” Using his speaker to blast rocks into pieces, he epitomizes someone with nothing left to lose. Then again, the goal of starting from scratch after an explosion is not completely successful. Zior Park still has streaks of orange in his hair in “Dead Channel” and “Angel;” one of his previous characters had all-orange hair. And some of the rock formations have faces and sing along, bringing back to mind the imaginative tales he told in prior children’s-TV show-like eras.

F2026 is about wanting an unconditional (and therefore impossible) escape hatch. Zior Park can continue to change up his look and sound all he wants (after all, this project’s EDM foundation is a 180 from his former alternative and rock eras), but he can never fully shed his past selves or strip them of meaning. Regardless of the form his makeover takes, F2026 is a surreal but smart reminder of what will always remain: a need for the kind of validation that neither feels shallow nor furthers his cynicism. 

#3: JUNHEE, LOVE METHOD
It is hard to know where to begin when listing reasons to appreciate this release! Both its overarching sentiment and its song-specific statements are well-put in terms of lyrics, tone, inflection, pacing, and everything else. JUNHEE’s lovestruck state elevates the impact of his high notes in “5 STARS,” “Wonder why,” and “Lemonade.” He plays with echoey filters in “Medicine” and “At least, I tried.” He further mixes things up by adding digital twists to “Lemonade,” a stomp-along style to “Forever young,” a rap-like delivery with zero spaces between words in “LA LA LA LUNE,” and a rad surround-sound effect in “GET OUT.” His words on their own also hit home and manage to sound both conversational and considerably crafted, like he has thought long and hard before deciding on which words to use to best express himself. Some of the many examples of his somewhat-plain yet somewhat-poetic framing: “Noise in my head / But I cut that wire / Step on the fear… I rise up higher / Talk all day / But they’re all just liars / Light my spark / Now I’m breathing fire” (“GET OUT”), “Where's my time? / I need to steal it back from you / Last July / Was just a distant déjà vu” (“At least, I tried”), and “I get a little sentimental / Thinking ‘bout my past / I wouldn't change it / Nevеr take it back / It's true / Led mе to you” (“Forever young”). The album’s umbrella statement is similar in how it has a transparent view without being bland: JUNHEE uses sunshine to talk about perseverance. He reminisces about “golden skies” in “LA LA LA LUNE” and is back to thinking about a “golden” time in “Lemonade”: “Sunlight is spinning bright in my head,” “Sunset glowing, gold in the air,” "laughing in the sun…” In the last song, “Forever young,” he reminds himself, “You just gotta chase the sun.” During that closing song, he admits, “Still don’t know what I be looking for,” a reminder that looking on the bright side requires patient practice. 

LOVE METHOD does not reach a conclusion as to what “method” will make JUNHEE love his life, but it does conclude that staying open to “chasing the sun” pays dividends. This explains his happy-go-lucky demeanor in the “LA LA LA LUNE” music video. He is sometimes giant and sometimes miniature, and the extras are sometimes his backup dancers and other times playground maintenance workers. The particulars don’t matter, since through it all, lots of blank space remains his for the decorating.

#2: milet, Made of Glass
By refusing to pigeonhole her spot on life’s emotional spectrum, milet makes a moving mosaic out of every piece of it. Her most shattering lows and most exhilarating highs are both tenderly treated, embodying her mindset that each “glass shard” needs to be carefully preserved to eventually become part of beautiful artwork. 

Made of Glass incidentally takes the form of a winding and abstraction-laden novel, a story in which the rudimentary aspects of the literature — characters, settings, plot — take a backseat to broader themes and the through-lines between them, which crystallize only after a period of patient and attentive close-reading. milet puts existential questions and answers before listeners; the answers just take longer to come into full focus. That clarifying process is artfully executed through the many small “shards” that make up each song: the start-and-stop instruments that draw attention to certain lines (a tactic used in “Hurricane” and “Unabara”), gradual changes to the layering in the sunnier songs (like how “Higher” adds a sensual twist to the optimism of “Happily,” and how the good vibes grow momentum from the first two songs up through the third and fourth), the quickened drumming when she sings about her mind “running circles” (in “Wings”), the instrumental progression in ballads (like “Wings” and “hanare banare”), the lines she repeats in parts besides the chorus (“I know” in “Golden Ember,” “Gone” in “Unabara,” “Can you imagine?” in “Christmas Eve”...), the particularly impactful comment on which some songs end (“Thank you!” in “Happily,” “Let’s keep it” in “Higher”)... milet never mentally checks out; there are not just no filler chapters, but no filler paragraphs!

These songs ache with a desperate need to believe and an unyielding yearning for proof of wishes having value. “I wanna still believe” is repeated in “Wings,” and “I still believe” is repeated in “I still.” She says, “I still believe in you and me,” and “Bluer” says as much: “You’re my living proof.” With milet’s loved one by her side, she has “proof” that “[t]here must be meaning… in days like these,” so she can “walk without the truth” coming from elsewhere (“Hurricane”). In other words, the person and relationship she believes in the genuineness and strength of so strongly is her anchor. However, with an anchor comes a forced groundedness, and milet sings about stagnation, flight, and being on the brink of tears because of the pendulum between them: “I’ve been running round in circles in my mind… tryna make a change… flying with my broken wings” (“Wings”); “It’s gonna make me cry” (also “Wings”); “I wish I could give you wings to fly / And you can forget me, no, I won’t cry / You can live without me / Now you’re free” (“Masterpiece”); “Those tears are fine, dawn will surely come… Everything has its meaning… I’ve caught up with you” (“Anytime Anywhere”); “You’re the wings for me” (“Bluer”); “The cage is open” (“Golden Ember”). Putting so much energy into someone else comes at the expense of figuring out who she is on her own; with someone else’s wings comes a sense that one does not have one’s own independent pair. In “Hurricane,” which starts the album, milet ends by asking, “Is this who I am?” In the following song, “Golden Ember,” she sings, “It’s who I am,” and “I’m in a bad dream… Now I see.” Towards the end of the album, milet questions her worth again, in “Masterpiece”: "I have nothing / I am nothing / Then what am I for you?” At the end, in the song “Perfect blue,” she realizes, “Only silence answered me / So I held my own hand tight.” In sum, she connects love to wings, wings to an anchor, an anchor to love, love to tears, tears to a personal breakthrough, and that personal breakthrough to the wings and self-worth that make milet her own anchor. Running through it all is the concept of “belief” and wishing for “proof.” That “proof” she aspires to hold is the “meaning… in days like these” that she opens the album singing about, in “Hurricane.” The meaning that each day holds comes across as an indirect teacher, much like a weighty novel. Listeners learn about the human condition simply by following the journey on which milet takes them, moving through mountains and valleys with the memorable musicality needed to work wonders. The audience sees themselves mirrored in milet more and more, as she keeps weaving thematic threads so that those threads never grow unbound. 

#1: Stray Kids, THIS & THAT
Stray Kids’ minimalism is still other artists’ maximalism! While each line, whether rapped or sung, sticks the landing thanks to Stray Kids’ signature spunk, there is a newly-consistent air of cavalierness. So much about this era screams “casual flex”: singing in four languages in one line (in “Way Out”), sounding completely unbothered in the lower-tempo-than-usual title track, and sneaking shoutouts to themselves in song after song! They sing “I run it” in “This & That” and “All my life, I’ve been fighting this and fighting that” in “RUN IT”! “After You” indirectly mentions 2018’s “Awkward Silence” (“My first words come out clumsy and awkward”) and 2019’s “19” (“like back at nineteen”). “FARMING” seems to reference 2024’s “Chk Chk Boom” (“Button, click click… boom”), 2018’s “My Pace” (“we on track”), 2020’s “Easy” at the same time as 2024’s ATE era (“that’s easy / We made it, taste it”), and 2023’s song about collecting in-game items, “ITEM” (“Get more items,” they sing, and “FARMING” is Gen Alpha slang for a video game task!).

The songs’ foundations are admittedly uninspired: EDM (“After You”), pop-rock (“I Do”), a ballad (“Way Out”)... but everything Stray Kids touches is so packed with personality that it feels reductive to describe their songs based on genre categories anyway. Their stage presence — whether the one pictured while listening to their music or the physical one —is larger than life, and that’s in part thanks to their music video’s ongoing multiverse premise! Nothing about Stray Kids is containable, which is why this era once again deploys clones to tell a far-out story! 

In the album’s trailer, “This” and “That” are akin to the word “Smurf” for those characters; “This” and “That” are the full language. Yet that is not even the strangest part! The members play opposite roles in the same scenes: the dance contestants and the judges, the baker and the customers, the auctioneer and the bidders… 

The “This & That” music video is just as effortlessly entertaining. The members appear in control of both headless characters and the camera, causing both to move at their discretion. Easter eggs (for example, the cuckoo clock is back, which startled Felix in 2022’s ODDINARY album trailer before things got extra surreal) and the way the action’s pacing syncs with the changing pace of the song further keep the audience completely invested.

“Everything I do, multiply it by two,” they boast in the title track; they revel in their ability to keep pushing their personal ceiling higher and higher. The basking in their successes takes some meta turns, like when they comment in “After You,” “Let’s turn [this feeling] into an anecdote;” when people wearing headphones rock out at a silent rave, each in their own little world, in the album trailer; and when Changbin plays a head chef who spins a plate like a vinyl record! (That last example doubles as a nod to their ATE era, which adds more meaning to THIS & THAT having eight tracks!) 

If this era had a tagline, it would be “It’s this AND that, not this OR that!” 

Check out more “Best New Music” rankings and reviews here and here!