K-POP IN REVIEW 2025: PART SIX – Outsiders
There are idols who exist on the edges of K-pop for various reasons. When I first started taking an interest in Korean pop music it all seemed fairly homogeneous and manufactured, and as with anything that you explore in detail you discover that first impressions are often mistaken, and things are considerably stranger than they seem on the surface.
Zior Park is one of those things that gets stranger as you get deeper. On first glance he might have been a rapper or a quirky singer-songwriter, but this year he’s given us something not unlike a glam-rock concept album about vampirism. Even before this I had no idea why my goths weren’t all over Zior Park, but he’s pretty much owning their ballpark by now. Twisted Fantasy is the goto track this year, but the whole album is great.
YOUNG POSSE happened to be on tour with Zior Park this year. Does that mean the weird kids hang out together? Let me know when you know. YOUNG POSSE blew us away last year with comedy girlie hip-hop, with genuinely hilarious, food-obsessed videos. So they started this year by driving us to tears with a totally different direction with Cold, but not before returning to the absolute mania with FREESTYLE and ADHD. Do we have to choose only one? Okay mum, it’s going to be ADHD then, but only because we don’t care what you think!
Billlie have long been some of our favourite weirdoes in K-pop. In some lights they look like the prog rock younger sisters of LOONA, but all of this is to the side because they didn’t release anything this year. However MOON SUA X SIYOON of Billlie surprised us with SNAP which was a total change of direction. Not entirely unlike Red Velvet’s Irene and Seulgi subunit. Punchy as hell and showing a whole new front that Billlie might open up further as a group in the future.
XG have been totally off the scale this year. Are they even K-pop? I mean, they’re all Japanese but operate out of a South Korean production team, and you know what? We don’t even care, because they’re the best. What is more their Cocona came out this year as transmasculine non-binary, which pushes them even further to the edge of what Asian idols can be. We loved their hyper-fashionista disco stylings on GALA, but we’re going with IN THE RAIN in that it shows their performance range. However, we’re also dropping in JURIN ASAYA‘s solo debut PS118 (featuring Rapsody) which is just a pristine hip hop groove, and expresses further the international spread of XG.