I started listening more to kpop over the last year. Most of the kpop songs I listen to lean towards being high energy and full of electronic and synth sounds. I think they work as a nice stimulation along with the visuals, choreography and creative concepts in their videos. If I am feeling low or dull, they often help me cross a certain activation energy, after which I become more "generative".

I am also an alt-pop / indie listener (stuff like Men I Trust, Tokyo Tea Room, Tame Impala) and kpop songs provide a nice mood contrast. At a certain point, I had gotten tired of the mellow dreampop melodies; it affects my mood and I don't want to chill or get into contemplation mode frequently.

This blog post serves as a playlist of a bunch of my favourite Kpop favourites. I try to describe what's unique for almost all of the tracks with more details for the top 10. The ranking is based on music, creativity (mainly music video) and choreography. Assume some recency bias too.

You will notice that I am mainly a NewJeans, ILLIT, aespa and LE SSERAFIM wrapper in terms of favourites. NewJeans specializes in clean vocals, choreography and instrumentals (with lots of sampling). They are famous for their unique "NEWJEANS" sound. It has a magical and dreamy feel to it. ILLIT is into electro dance, teenage girl aesthetic and angelic vocals. aespa leans into bold and experimental, probably the most creative group of all. LE SERRAFIM leans towards being catchy, chill and often having a silly vibe. MVs usually have good choreography too.

I think I have also been inspired by the creative direction of the music videos - in terms of cinematography, color coding, fashion, and seeing how much effort and attention to detail the kpop idols and their teams put in.

All these songs sound more exciting and amazing on MacBook M1 series speakers, ideally the 16-inch ones. These speakers are great for punchy bass and electronic sounds. I have found that I don't like these songs as much on loudspeakers with deepbass. I think the (electronic) kpop sound favours punchy bass over deep bass in the same way Tame Impala's music favour punchiness (e.g The Less I Know The Better).