Bias & Beyond

  Apologies for the long gap between posts! I have been extremely busy with daily life here including getting ready to change jobs and hosting my sister for her first ever visit to Asia for the Seollal holidays. We are now slowly escaping the end of the extreme winter we have been having here in South Korea. At one point in January the average daily temperatures in Seoul were not creeping above -6c. For the most part I was simply trying to keep myself warm so I don’t freeze off my extremities while commuting to and from work. During one of those freezing days, I was at the gym with one of my closest friends who currently works at an entertainment company. We were on the treadmill gossiping about life when NCT 127’s Fact Check came on over the speakers. We both paused in mid conversation and ended up dancing on the treadmill, cracking up as we had realised what had happened. After our mini jam session on the treadmill, we continued as normal but a thought crossed my mind at that po...

I am not sure if this was actually something that is true or just what I was personally observing on my various platforms that I frequent on but there were a lot of top 10/20 lists floating about on the internet with different media and professionals talking about their top K-Pop picks of 2025. So despite me being late to the party, I thought why not join in and have some fun with the songs that I enjoyed that were actually released last year. I admit it is going to be hard because I tend to blast things that actually were released in previous years if my Spotify Wrapped was anything to go back but nevertheless I am going to share my top eight (in no particular order) K-Pop tracks of 2025 with as much personal justification as possible as to why I liked them. Why eight? Because eight is great! And I wanted to be different. Python - GOT7 As mentioned in a previous entry on this site, Python was my most listened to track of 2025. And it wasn’t until I watched Form of Therapy’s reaction t...

There are some of you out there who know that my journey into K-Pop came from my interest in anime and therefore J-Rock and J-Pop (thanks to the opening and ending songs of certain songs). This is the case for a lot of us K-Pop fans from the 2000s. People don’t realise how difficult it was to try and fully listen to a high quality anime OP that wasn’t the “TV size” version (basically, the version of the song made for the anime) or a short PV as YouTube was still relatively new as a platform (we’re talking during the years when I was at university, so 2006 - 2009) as Japanese music companies were not seeing it as useful platform at the time and overall the Japanese music market was pretty much self sufficient that it didn’t need to market its artists outside of Japan. In fact, even now Japanese is still the second biggest music market globally behind the United States and in front of the United Kingdom. Still, despite its inaccessibility, people of the West still tried to listen to the ...