K-POP IN REVIEW 2025: PART THREE – The Boys
Okay, time to get back into this annual review, and now we’ve got a special issue for the men in K-pop. We know they’re never as good as the girls, but they deserve some attention.
SUPER JUNIOR: these lads started twenty years ago, and have been a consistent element of the K-pop landscape pretty much the whole time. But we’re not just stanning them out of respect; the contemporary SUPER JUNIOR are still a set of super-super men. The pick of their new album is Express Mode, and it is indeed a 100% certified slapper as advertised.
KAI: He’s always been this enormous lunk of a superstar, the front boy of EXO, and his solo career has been worth watching for a long while, but on his return from military service he has rewarded us with a new album, Wait on Me, which is what the kids call a no skip classic. This being the case it’s hard to choose one track, but Walls Don’t Talk should give you a sense of the quality.
TEN: Once again we’re choosing from the SM Entertainment top drawer of boys, and TEN is to die for. Gay as the day is long, Thai, and a key figure in crucial NCT sub-units including their Chinese WayV franchise, and the supergroup Super M. Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul, as his mum calls him, can out-dance and out-sing pretty much anyone from Freddie Mercury to Michael Jackson, and on this basis, his solo career has long been a concern here. He put out two solo albums this year, one in Korean and the other in Japanese, but we’re going with the Japanese release, because it’s just fucking amazing. Listen to the whole thing, but SILENCE is very very special.