pink-blooded: thirty years of SM entertainment.
part iv: fourth & fifth generation.
members: karina (leader), giselle, winter, ningning
fanclub name: my
fan color: aurora
fan lightstick: 예뽕
호칭 (introduction): be my ae.
i love aespa. i have a particular soft spot for karina (born: yoo jimin) because she seems like a sweet human being, and i feel hugely protective of her because she’s fifteen years younger than i am. this is how i know i’m a kkonde — now, when i see these baby idols (and they’re all babies relative to me), i just want to feed them and make sure they get enough sleep. i want them to be healthy and happy, and i want them to enjoy their careers. you’re only young once, and i know what it’s like to lose your youth to trauma — and i do think idoldom, as it is, is a form of trauma.
anyway, so, i love aespa, but i do think they’re still pretty weak performers, and i don’t know if it’s a personality thing or a gendered double standard thing because girls are held to different standards than boys.
i went to see aespa when they performed at the prudential center in february 2025, and i actually left the concert early because i was so bored, to the point that i wished i’d saved my money and gone to see NCT 127 instead. the greater majority of the concert was lip synced, and there were way too many video breaks, and the girls didn’t really engage with the audience. the last, i don’t care that much about — there’s a language barrier, they could have been having an off-day, and nell, my favorite band, is famous for just performing and not doing long ments during their concerts. i do, however, care about the excessive lip-syncing, and the video breaks because the main energy from a concert comes from the performances.
(one of the things YG does incredibly well is that they prioritize live performances and tend to put out artists with great stage presence.)
i think one of the negative effects that have come from both lockdown during covid and the rise of youtube/social media is the death of live music shows. k-pop really shone in its second (into third) generation because lip-syncing was implicitly discouraged and there was a range of live music shows, from yoo heeyeol’s sketchbook, yoon dohyun’s must, ebs space, etc., where idols went to perform in front of a live studio audience. sure, we have shows like it’s k-pop or dingo where we ostensibly get live performances, but there’s no live audience, and there’s often a considerable amount of post-processing done.
aespa debuted during covid, and i gave them a lot of slack during their early years because covid made live performances impossible. they had great songs and all the members were pretty and sounded nice together, but they lacked stage charisma and gravitas — because, realistically, they didn’t have the requisite opportunities to build that experience. how could they get confidence on a stage in front of an audience if they were only performing in closed studios where everything could be controlled and edited? it doesn’t matter how much an artist practices in the privacy of their home or studio; a live stage is always different — it’s a living, breathing thing, where the artist feeds as much off the audience’s energy and vice versa, and the only way an artist can get better at being on stage is by performing.
to their credit, aespa has shown significant improvement over the years as the world started opening up again, but i still often find something lacking when they’re on stage. i don’t think it’s necessarily their fault, either — in general, i’m over SM making their [female] artists lip sync more or depend on loud backing tracks that drown them out, and i think there’s a connection between the lip syncing and beauty standards. in order to sustain dancing and singing to the level required by k-pop, you have to eat. you need musculature. k-pop girls, though, seem to have gotten even thinner in recent years, which alarms me; it just isn’t physically possible to perform at the energy levels k-pop demands without musculature and without caloric intake. this also annoys me because i find the prevalence of lip syncing to be connected to an even heavier prioritization of projecting “perfection” over showcasing skill — like, it’s more important to look pretty “singing” than it is to allow the body and face to contort as necessary to sing well. similarly, it’s more important to prevent any potential mistakes than it is to perform live, so, even if an idol appears on a program like it’s live, they’re often post-processed to hell.
this annoys me a lot when it comes to aespa because the girls are talented. ninging, in particular, has a beautiful voice and has a lot of potential, and karina might not be as adept a vocalist, but her voice has a unique, pleasant color that could be utilized far better than it actually is. winter is very well-trained but is still stiff on stage and seems to lack confidence, and SM should stop sidelining giselle — she has a spark that the other girls kind of don’t on stage.
and, then, i think SM has been further crippling aespa by making them sing more in english this past year, which puts limits on their lyrics and reduces them to insipid lines (see: karina’s new solo song) that not only sound bad linguistically and have zero substance but also make the girls sound more warbly. to be clear, i don’t expect depth from pop music, but i do want the lyrics not to be complete nonsense (which is one reason i can’t really get into YG’s baby monster, despite thinking those girls are talented).
this tendency to try to conform seems to be a weakness that k-pop has yet to shed when it comes to the west, though, even now, over a decade since boa and YG’s se7en tried to venture stateside. i think k-pop needs to accept that it is a niche in the U.S. and will always only be a niche. there is nothing wrong with being a niche in the U.S., and i think it’s such wasted effort on the part of every k-pop company to try to pander to the west and bend its artists to try to fit what they think the U.S. market will want. the U.S. market doesn’t want korean pop stars; this country is far too racist to permit that; and k-pop has made the strides it has thus far by being k-pop.
(also i have to include my customary rant here about how i’m really over western writing about k-pop. so much of the writing betrays latent racism i don’t even think the writers themselves are aware they carry, and i’m generally over this bullshit notion that non-korean, usually white writers are somehow “objective” and “unbiased,” so they’re more qualified to write about k-pop. [no one is objective or unbiased; everyone has a bias; the very idea is weaponized to refuse people of color seats at the table.] most of these writers have a very limited view of k-pop, limited mostly to the more popular groups today, if not restricted pretty solely to bangtan, blackpink, and maybe newjeans, and western media has a sensationalist narrative of k-pop it loves to push, namely that the idol industry is “toxic,” riddled with “slave contracts” and exploitation, like the same rot doesn’t exist at the core of the U.S. music industry. the hypocrisy is wild, and the inability and refusal to contextualize k-pop properly and examine it without viewing it through a western-centric perspective are just another way of enforcing racist notions of white superiority. i think all the writing about newjeans in the west is a great example of this. anyway, i’m all for gatekeeping all things korean, and i don’t think you should be allowed to write about k-pop if you can’t access any source material in korean and have no cultural understanding of the sociopolitical context that makes korean idol industry what it is.)
but going back to aespa — 2024 was a banner year for aespa, and they just celebrated their fifth anniversary in november 2025. i wish SM would stop working them to death and give them a break because their schedule has been brutal for the last few years, and this goes back to what i was saying earlier — the korean idol industry, in general, is not one that really seems to think about the long-term but wants the current hit, the current trend, the current success, and i think it’s short-sighted. the ones who bear the brunt of the damage from that mentality are the idols, these young people who give up their youth, education, and health for a shot to stand on a stage, and i wish SM would carry that responsibility with a little more gravity and start thinking more about the bigger picture and longevity. the company has been around for thirty years. it would be nice to see some growth and to see SM lead the industry in a more positive way.
recommended songs:
“black mamba” (black mamba, 2020)
“yeppi yeppi” (savage, 2021)
“dreams come true” (girls, 2022)
“welcome to my world” (my world, 2023)
“supernova” (armageddon, 2024)
“kill it” (whiplash, 2024)
“dirty work” (dirty work, 2025)
members: boa, taeyeon (SNSD), hyoyeon (SNSD), seulgi (red velvet), wendy (red velvet), karina (aespa), winter (aespa)
fanclub info: n/a
GOT the beat is a supergroup formed with members from four generations of SM women — boa (first gen), taeyeon and hyoyeon (SNSD, second gen), seulgi and wendy (red velvet, third gen), and karina and winter (aespa, fourth gen). “GOT” is supposed to be an acronym for “girls on top.”
honestly, i get annoyed thinking about got the beat because super m had great music while got the beat got two very meh singles, with their first single, “step back,” rightfully getting a lot of flack for its misogynistic lyrics that seemed outdated and even went against the whole concept of the unit being formed of badass k-pop women. their follow-up, “step on it,” was largely forgettable.
i wasn’t really a fan of their music, but i really loved the videos that came out of got the beat because it’s really special to be able to see four generations of k-pop women in one space. it’s something only SM could do.
when got the beat first came together, there was a lot of chatter that the group was formed for boa, who had always been a soloist, like the supergroup was put together because she wanted to be part of a group. she dispelled that rumor firmly when she appeared on hyoyeon’s youtube show earlier this year, making it sound like she was really frustrated with this rumor. got the beat was actually another of lee sooman’s projects, and it apparently was supposed to be more wide-ranging than this one iteration of seven members, meant to highlight different female idols in SM, but the project died with lee sooman’s ouster, which i think is a pity.
one of the strongest things SM has is its multi-generation roster, and i wish they would utilize this more.
recommended songs: GOT the beat only released two singles unfortunately
members: shotaro, eunseok, sungchan, wonbin, sohee, anton
former member: seunghan
fanclub name: briize
fan color: n/a
fan lightstick: boorabong
호칭 (introduction): n/a
riize stands for “rise and realize.” in my opinion, there’s a giant creative hole left by lee sooman’s abrupt and ugly departure in 2023, and i think we’re seeing it partly in group names and mostly in a lack of strong creative vision.
riize was the first group SM debuted after lee sooman’s ouster, and i think you can tell. i feel like there’s a creative hole in SM right now, a lack of clarity and creative direction when it comes to the new groups who have yet to be established, and, while i’ve enjoyed several of riize’s songs, i’m still kind of confused by them because they don’t seem to have a clear identity. i don’t think SM really knows what to do with them either, so they’ve felt a little like an extension of NCT without being part of NCT, especially because members shotaro and sungchan initially debuted with NCT in 2020 before leaving the group in 2023 and members eunseok and seunghan were announced to be joining NCT’s tokyo unit (NCT wish), only to debut as part of riize.
riize also doesn’t really have a vocal to anchor the group; they all generally sound good together, as you’d expect from a SM group; but there isn’t a stand-out vocal. sohee is probably the closest. i did think their first studio album, odyssey (2025), felt like a soft pivot into a different direction, and they’re due to release their next single on november 24, so i guess we’ll see if SM has a firmer sense of riize’s identity.
recommended songs:
“memories” (get a guitar, 2023)
“love 119” (riizing, 2024)
“show me love” (odyssey, 2025)
fanclub info: same as NCT
many members of NCT have released solo music, but i only include doyoung in this because i love his voice. he is so technically good, but he is also an incredibly emotive singer, so his technical ability doesn’t have a chilling factor on his singing. he reminds me a lot of taeyeon in many ways— they’re both just very skilled singers who both are in entertainment because they love to sing, and all they want to do is sing. they are both clearly so happy on stage.
i also just really love doyoung himself — he’s so sassy, though he has such strong 모범생 vibes, and he’s unafraid to be earnest, even if it makes him so easy to tease. the way his aegyo comes out when he’s been drinking is hilarious.
his debut solo album, youth, was one of my favorite releases of 2024, and the first track, “새봄의 노래 (beginning)” is one of my absolute favorite songs ever. i was so bummed i couldn’t get a ticket to his solo concert when i was in korea in june, but i did get a ticket to see him perform at the seoul jazz festival, and he opened his set with that song, and i almost cried.
i will say that i thought his second album was weaker, though it was still cohesive and thought through, and i love the people he worked with, including nell’s kim jongwan.
doyoung is off to gundae in december 2025, and i am actually very sad that we will not be able to hear him sing for two years. i’m used to idols and actors going off to gundae, so i’m not usually that affected by it, but doyoung?! i’m going to miss doyoung a whole lot.
recommended songs:
“새봄의 노래 (beginning)” (청춘의 포말 [youth], 2024)
“lost in california” (청춘의 포말 [youth], 2024)
“시리도록 눈부신 (the story”) (the story, 2024)
“sand box” (soar, 2025)
members: jiwoo (leader), carmen, yuha, stella, juun, a-na, ian, ye-on
fanclub name: S2 (하츄)
fan color: baby blue
fan lightstick: n/a
호칭 (introduction): n/a
hearts2hearts (H2H) debuted on 2025 february 24, so it’s still too soon to say anything definitively about the group, even though they’ve released a second single and a mini album since. they continue to be very SNSD-coded to me, imbued with a sense of nostalgia for the innocent girlhood that was SNSD’s brand. their debut song, honestly, is just fine — the song is fine, the girls look good, and they sound good — but it’s nothing spectacular, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. we get the pleasant harmonies and vocal color and production value we expect from SM, but we don’t get any stand-out vocals or anything really unique. i’m not writing them off because, again, it’s too soon to tell and not every group from SM debuts with the clearest vision, but i’m hesitant because we haven’t really heard them live yet.
my main issue with H2H is that there isn’t anyone who stands out to me vocally; similar to riize, there isn’t a vocal to anchor the group. i don’t know if this is a strategy with SM, to focus on the girls’ overall vocal tone — and, like every other SM group, H2H sounds really pretty together — but i keep waiting for the main and lead vocalists to pop out, but they never do, so their songs sound a little flat. i thought it worked for “the chase,” which i actually thought was a great debut song and introduction to H2H’s style and tone, but the flat affect continues, and i haven't been super excited by their following two releases.
i think it is still fair to say that SM is the company that prioritizes vocals. they do vocally train their artists (and continue to train them, long after debut), and they put together groups that sound good together with a strong vocal center. i also love how they mix/engineer their songs — there is an SM sound i can’t explain because i lack the technical language and knowledge of song production, but SM songs are generally put together in a cohesive way that runs through pretty much all their production. obviously, they have their missteps, too, especially when they venture into other genres (there was some questionable mixing on doyoung’s second album), but, in general, there is a SM way of packaging their music that is consistent across the company.
NCT is an example of how the SM sound works. their noise music is still noisy and loud, but it’s wrapped in SM’s production that smooths out the bluntest edges and brings everything together neatly. a song like “sticker” worked in SM’s hands because of SM’s tendency to think things through, maybe a little obsessively, and to polish and, also, to give the right songs to the right groups — a group other than exo probably couldn’t have pulled off the ridiculousness that is “늑대와 미녀 (wolf),” just like “sticker” had to be done by NCT 127.
and this is where personal taste kicks in — i like how polished SM is, the quality of their sound production, and the style of their choreography. i enjoy the way SM artists sound, apart from the voices themselves, because i appreciate the way SM assembles its groups sonically and arranges them within the SM universe (lol is kwangya still a thing?). part of my personal preference is very much influenced by the fact that i grew up on SM and have followed this company for basically thirty years, so SM has inevitably shaped my taste, but that’s not inherently good or bad — it just is. there’s no intrinsic moral value to personal taste.
recommended songs:
“the chase” (the chase, 2025)
“apple pie” (focus, 2025)
“flutter” (focus, 2025)
fanclub name: n/a
fan color: n/a
fan lightstick: n/a
호칭 (introduction): n/a
xnghan has released one single, so i don’t really have any opinions about him yet. i’m glad SM hasn’t dropped him, and, while i am annoyed with how SM handled this whole situation (basically, xnghan debuted as part of riize, then photos of him with a girlfriend pre-debut emerged, fans got mad, SM temporarily removed him from the group, a year later, SM tried to add him back, half the fandom revolved and sent funeral wreaths to SM, xnghan officially left riize), i still go back to what i said before — i’m not sure what a company is supposed to do. i don’t think SM should have capitulated to kids who apparently have too much time and expendable income on their hands, but i also don’t know that they were wrong in having seunghan leave riize. i’m glad they’re still supporting him and having him debut solo, and it seems like maybe this could finally be the rotational idea that works — the idea seems to be that xnghan will collaborate with different artists.
anyway, there’s a lot to criticize about SM, and SM doesn’t always handle their controversial members well. in some situations, like with choi siwon, i don’t see what SM can do — again, choi siwon has terrible opinions, but he hasn’t committed a crime. anti-fans love to dredge up the taeil situation whenever they want, but that situation was actually one where i thought SM did everything right — they removed him from the group once they learned of the accusation, they waited until he was indicted to terminate his contract (terminating earlier could have resulted in fees owed to taeil), and they basically pretend like he never existed. i also don’t buy the argument that the other members must have known; predators hide in plain sight from the closest people in their lives all the time.
now, if only SM would stop being a mess and get its head out of its ass and give us that OT9 exo comeback …
recommended songs: n/a