Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
NCT U, SM Entertainment‘s revolving boy band that came with their own sasaeng creator, released the music video for “The 7th Sense” recently, and boy is it … a whole bunch of boring.
There was a ton of hype behind the concept of NCT and the group NCT U itself, but everything about this besides the choreography feels like something that’s been done better a hundred times over by the likes of Zion.T, DEAN, and Crush, along with their usual suspects of rapping collaborators.
“The 7th Sense” basically makes me wish I could give the sense of hearing back so I wouldn’t be bored into a coma by by this, and that’s coming from somebody who does enjoy (some) slow burn tracks by the aforementioned R&B crooners. But even those efforts have more complexity in their instrumentals and better the utilization of vocals than this, which somehow manages to drop the BPM to a snail’s pace. Additionally, the reason SME doesn’t utilize rappers becomes clearer and clearer by the group (because they can’t develop them), and it’s gonna get embarrassing if they continue with this sweg concept.
Look, they even put themselves to sleep.
The bottom line is that if I didn’t know it was NCT U and I didn’t know they’re supposed to be a big deal, I wouldn’t have even bothered reviewing this. This is stuff that I routinely ignore writing about when I see it in R&B releases, except it’s probably worse because they don’t have actual rappers guesting on the track and instead try to rap themselves. Surely they are better than this, but as far as first impressions go, this is pretty terrible.
Of course, it doesn’t matter much what anybody writes, cause their visuals are there and it’s SME, so there’s a built-in fanbase, regardless. I just can’t see a reason anybody would care about NCT U based on this unless they were already fully invested in the hype. Given some of the positive initial reaction to this, I’m starting to think the hypnotic, sleep-inducing nature of the track is actually subliminal brainwashing of some sort. At least that would make sense.
