And shut it down…

[Video]
[4.78]

Leah Isobel: LOONA’s strongest material is lush, sleek, and featherlight. Their air is professional and restrained, almost buttoned-up, which means that in the war against BLACKPINK’s maximalist influence they’re at a heavy disadvantage. “So What” and “Why Not” got around this problem by focusing on forward momentum, introducing unexpected major-key modality, and by being well-produced. “PTT” keeps the second trick only.
[4]

Michael Hong: “PTT” hinges on heavy percussion and an onomatopoeic chorus, but rookie debuts by Hot Issue and TRI.BE sold it better by actually merging the two. “PTT” empties the drums right when it needs them most, flattening its chorus to be wholly uninteresting.
[2]

Ryo Miyauchi: Messages of empowerment aren’t new for LOONA. Nor is the head-smacking obviousness by which said messages are delivered. But what spoils “PTT” is the group’s failure to distinguish their own identity amid their trend-chasing. They play squarely to the Blackpink-patented girl-crush mode, while other girl groups have either doubled down on the chaotic bombast or added some tween cheesiness. It’s strange to see, because they’ve proven to be capable of so much more on their B-sides or the pre-debut solo tracks. And with the wink to iconography from Kim Lip to “Eclipse” or Olivia Hye’s declaration that she’s “like a wolf to the moon,” LOONA themselves make their past loom heavy.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The tabla grabbed my attention — was LOONA gonna play with Bollywood schlock? Alas. The detritus of a decade’s worth of pop song cliches raises a faint stink.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: As faithful a recreation of the garish mid-aughts era of pop as the Rina Sawayama album. Or actually, make that the era a few years later; you’ve got to go to the late aughts before you find stuff like the half-time breakdown and the part that almost turns into “If U Seek Amy.” It was a messy time, full of messy songs (exhibit A: the lyric “if you seek Amy”). But messiness, if looked at a certain way, becomes maximalism. And Loona certainly do the maximum here.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I was going to say this sounds dated, like it might have been pitched and rejected for Britney’s Circus. It’s been brought up to date with some quasi-Bollywood touches, but these are so clumsily deployed that the whole thing instead sounds like an Azerbaijani Eurovision entry — not that there’s more than two degrees of separation between these things. “PTT” is just so unpleasantly shrieky in every way that it’s possible for a song to be. There’s just too much going on.
[5]

Joshua Lu: The Itzyfication of Loona has been ruining them for years, and this song is not their first to be noisy for the sake of it. But it is their worst offender so far, with those ersatz Bollywood beats undergirding members who aren’t even committing to the aesthetic. The vocals are too cutesy, and that ending chant wants to sound serrated but has the edge of a damp paper bag. The worst part is that this is also their most successful release so far, as it’s their first song to land on the Gaon Digital Chart. I don’t blame them for pivoting to commercialized pap — 3.8s on Rate Your Music don’t keep investors happy — but it miffs me a bit to see this once-innovative girl group chasing trends so intently. It’s almost like the music industry is soulless or something, huh?
[2]

Crystal Leww: This is definitely not the best LOONA single, and there are broader problems with the direction their music’s headed in, but “PTT” still bangs. Critics were less than thrilled about Lee Soo Man, who tended to chase trends to make hits rather than shaping the vision that had emerged during LOONA’s earlier era(s). And though I disagree with the assessment, mostly because I love a noisy, heavy EDM pop song, it is nice that the Bollywood influence makes this more than another dime a dozen. However, everything from the bridge onwards hints at a direction that would give LOONA’s act more cohesion, from the layered harmonies to the voicebox chanting to just lettting Chuu belt that shit out. LOONA needs to lean more heavily into R&B, but until then “PTT” is a fun single for the moon girlies.
[7]

Iris Xie: Initially, I was thrown off by how much this reminds me of an Everglow and Blackpink hybrid with its Bollywood homages and the militaristic verses, and was ready to write it off as “So What: 2.0.” But once the song takes off around 1:02 in the MV (0:50 in the song), when the deeper bass kicks in and lifts up the pre-chorus, I understood it more. “PTT” is menacing, with how the instrumentals glare amongst the punctuated vocals, and this only lets up with Haseul’s sharp but serene bridge. And K-pop does love menace. Amid the pretty visuals and rock-solid choreography, post-Jaden Jeong LOONA finally has a song reminiscent of the confidence of their much more experimental pre-group debut discography. If only they’d consider going back to that sound, that would be great — but “PTT” is a reminder that execution is everything.
[7]