chocolatesandjournals

JYP Entertainment, home to the popular groups TWICE, Stray Kids, ITZY, Wonder Girls, and 2PM, debuted another promising girl group from the unknown world of seas and ships, NMIXX. They came out with a single album called "Ad Mare" which contains four tracks including their debut song, O.O (pronounced as oh-oh). Ships, Flowers, and Jellyfishes, And Mix! The music video started with a dystopian feel. NMIXX, wearing neutral-colored, jellyfish-looking outfits, and boots, danced in front of a big pirate ship where they come from. It moves to an obvious "zero Coke" advertisement and the girls showing off their strong "baila, baila, baila" (dance, dance, dance) in the chorus. 

Note: This blog was edited. It was posted before on Tumblr and I decided to fix some errors as I move here.  ENHYPEN's music is tied with their idol life.   It is becoming more apparent as they release more music.  And so,  I decided to go back and just lay down all the things I noticed from the debut trailers because it is an end of an era.  After all, the debut trailers teased the whole transformation from trainees to idols, or in their universe, from humans to vampires.

One busy day in May, I decided to watch Music Bank live stream on YouTube and found this sweet song from STAYC, So What.  I enjoyed their performance and thought, "wow, bubblegum is going back to KPOP." With the rise of girl groups with dark and edgy concepts, it is refreshing to hear this type of music. Another interesting part was they were singing live with hand-held microphones. Very cool!

STAYC came back with a new mini-album, "Stereotype" on September 26, 2021, and I decided to give the whole album a listen. Stereotype The flute-like sounds at the start of this song gave a dreamy vibe. It can be an OST song for teen dramas like Extraordinary You (I love that K-drama.) I guess that's why the MV is like a high teen movie. The pre-chorus is so good and made me appreciate Isa's voice. She also did the bridge part and that was the highlight of the song. Chorus was already revealed as a teaser and I think that worked for this song. If I did not hear the chorus beforehand, I don't think I will like it on the first listen.

Girls Planet 999 is a reality-survival show where trainees are divided according to the language they speak: Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  There are 99 trainees in total, 33 trainees from each country. 3 trainees -1 from each country- were grouped into smaller teams called "cell" and they have to survive together. If one fails, all three will be eliminated. However, they have a choice to maintain or form a new cell if they are part of the Planet Top 9, which will be voted by Planet Guardians (Global viewers).