Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
JYP Entertainment has always aimed to continue that girl crush/empowered teen concept they established at the outset with ITZY, but since 2020’s “Wannabe” they have not been able to recapture the music that made them a hot commodity. While ITZY’s music has never been necessarily my taste, they’ve quickly gone from “oh this is fun” to “well I don’t like this, but I could see the appeal to others” to “oh man, what the hell is this” in a span of a few years.
Still, JYPE got NMIXX back on track a bit as of late and ITZY’s pre-release seemed to promise a sonic change, so there was some hope. Unfortunately, “CAKE” is another miss that sees the most irritating section — with the repetitive “cake cake cake cake cake” refrain and horns boldly blaring — take up almost half the song, and even the vocal-centric chorus is somewhat flat and feels out of place. Honestly, it’s pretty annoying overall, both the song and the fact that we already know they can do better yet are relegated to this stuff instead.
Uh … at least the music video is cool and the members look great in the concept?
