Girlset – Chat

JYP and Republic’s international group with an appeal to the onlookers…

[Video]
[5.17]Leah Isobel: Girlset’s old-fashioned Disney Channel vibe makes them a slightly awkward fit for these terminally-online lyrics; they deliver them professionally, meaning stilted. But the song itself is surprisingly durable: the hooks are placed properly, the melodies unfurl pleasantly, and the song lines up all kinds of rhythmic and sonic starbursts beneath the surface garishness. It’s the kind of craft that costs real money, not just Robux.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The familiarity of its subject doesn’t mitigate the pleasure given by its clickety beats and bass squelches. I learned a few new words too.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The willingness of black folx to contribute to their own erasure is unsurprising, if not frustrating. That’s it, that’s the verse.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Serving “Gnarly” or “Pinky Up” levels of slop. I mean this mostly pejoratively, but I also can’t help but be a little charmed.
[6]

Al Varela: Points for at least a decently produced beat that isn’t the most obnoxious part of the song, but all these ironic memetic stream terms being thrown around in autotune and it girl posturing is just exhausting to me. K-pop girl groups are in their bro-country era and Katseye are the Florida Georgia Line who kicked it off. Blech.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are theses upon theses to be written about the implications of the livestream-chat structure on culture in the 2020s (the self-referential cascades of memes! the balances of power between perceiver and perceived! the spread of clips and snippets far beyond the bounds of context!) but “Chat” doesn’t really get at any of that. Instead, it’s about nothing. This is a fine thing for a song to be about, of course, but the nonsense mode that “Chat” operates in works best if the provocations and hype moments provoke and awe appropriately. This is all so de rigueur; we cover a K-pop (broadly speaking) single of this ilk every month, it feels like, and the slays are beginning to wear on me. See you in September, I suppose.
[4]