Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Hearts2Hearts, SM Entertainment‘s new girl group presumably inspired by previous K-pop legends, have made their debut with “The Chase“. Leading up to their much-hyped beginning, a lot of the discourse revolved around their visuals and whose concept they were inspired by or copying or whatever nonsense. But even if they did lift something, I’m not sure anybody would really want to claim this, because it’s as generic as it gets.
The track somewhat fits in with the chill and laid-back trend, which desperately tries to come up with the next broadly-appealing mainstream hit, though this felt as if they were trying to avoid making any impact whatsoever. The problem with going in this direction is when the central melodies don’t hit, the performance is unremarkable, and the underlying production is generic, you end up with department store music (if it even has the juice for that).
Honestly, when it comes to debuts, being boring is definitely worse than being bad. This won’t even provide anything to look back on and make fun of on variety shows (if they still allowed them to go on those) in 10 years. The good news is they’re from SME, so they’ll probably sell a billion records and chart well anyway, which should afford them time to develop their sound (or a sound at all).
