If every K-pop member went solo, it’s possible we might never have to listen to anything else. APPROVE.
[Video][Website]
[6.33]
Iain Mew: The album cover suggests an obvious inspiration from another recent single by a girl group member gone solo, Gain’s “Bloom”, and Sunmi is here to Talk About S(ex) too. She does so with more ambivalence than joy, despairing at time slipping away from her, which sounds a more interesting concept in theory, but it doesn’t turn out that way. She has a good go at portraying consuming addiction, but the song is just a bit lightweight to match the intensity of the words.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Sunmi sings in an airy, snappy voice, garnishing her delivery with deep breathing and curled endings. The intention is to exude sensuality but it’s too much: a masterclass in exasperation. “24 Hours” is well-written enough that it finds ways to accommodate Sunmi’s limitations with electroclash synthesiser buzzes and faux-classical interludes. JYP want this to be a huge hit — label president Park Jin Young himself takes the mantle as songwriter and producer here — and appear to have thrown as much money as possible at it. Sunmi may not have another chance this expensive. It’ll do, but only just.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Bouncy, pixel-exploding electro pop is where writer and producer Park Jin-young shines…which he’s demonstrated many times before “24 Hours,” a song that sounds like a slight alteration of miss A’s “Good-bye Baby.” To the song’s credit, Sunmi’s song features a nifty little tango breakdown that adds a dash of intrigue to this formula. Still, this is a good enough sound done better in the past by the same guy.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The backup vocals are a fluttery delight, the rest cruises at the right altitude.
[6]
Madeleine Lee: The song is good, but this kind of mildly dark electro-pop is nothing new for JYP – it’s easy to mentally assign the lines to the members of miss A, with a similar sonic result (or to 2PM if you want to be funny). The real story is Sunmi: she was never one of the more charismatic members of the Wonder Girls, but here she takes charge of the whole show, and even manages to make the tango breakdown sound like a fantastical escape rather than a confusing distraction.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I don’t know if that heavy-throbbing bass is supposed to suggest disorientation and vertigo (the video suggests a mental-health metaphor at work), but the association works for me, rooting the campy strut over top of it to something darker and less easy to control. The fact that a string quartet flares up in the middle right only adds to the unease.
[8]
Tara Hillegeist: This is the kind of sparky precision of production that calls to mind all those songs from early-’00s US popcult’s pop&b boom that weren’t the brainchild of Max Martin, particularly in its plainspoken aggression and those cold-sexy bleeps and blitzes, and Sunmi’s stuttery gasps stop and flicker almost as tightly as the skittery, old-school “video-gamey” beat underlying the whole track. “24 Hours” goes to the digital-drama Celebrity place with an oxymoronic level of focused restlessness. Swerving and careening around a fractured pop landscape, cherrypicking discrete sonic effects from the aftermath of everyone else’s hurricanes and assembling them like towers for Sunmi’s stop-start vocals to dance above, it gestures towards a level of raging intensity that it only ever whirls away from, light-footed and grinning, teasing even to the end.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: When this clicked for me: hearing it as Mike Posner Minus Mike Posner. (Tango slipped into the equation somehow.)
[7]
Brad Shoup: I do love the reliable Glitterstomp. Please tell me why it was interrupted for synthetic tango.
[4]