Completing our global girl group day with Xtraordinary Girls, a Japanese group based in Korea…
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[6.75]
Kayla Beardslee: My struggle with XG is that their visual style presents them as a futuristic, daring, and even alien group who wants to be taken seriously (have they ever shot a music video that they didn’t use as an opportunity to go to another planet?), but their music is much more interested in looking backwards than forwards, and if anything becomes less remarkable the closer their influences get to the present. They’ve done an excellent job sliding onto 2000s R&B and living it up over ‘90s house beats, and can always be counted on to deliver vocal and lyrical confidence — less dedicated performers would falter at lines like “swag too official.” I think that XG are best understood contrary to their own marketing, as a nostalgia act that can get too caught up in surface-level word salad for their own good — I have to call out the impressive chain of totally meaningless phrases that makes up the pre-chorus of “Gala.” (“My worth can never be/In all the realm of eternity/Let your words and couture/Drape in colors and desire/On this night of fate”: they’re stacking “and”s like me writing a TSJ blurb!) “Gala” is a stately approach to some pretty meandering rap verses, and I have more fun with XG’s music when they’re not acting quite as composed as they do here. The track is still decent fun with a glitzy beat: there’s just nothing that makes me want to keep thinking about it once the music ends.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Sometimes I think to myself “do I really just not like most K-pop? That seems overly broad, like not liking all sandwiches or something,” and then I hear some actually good K-pop and am reminded that no, it’s just that a lot of it is pretty mid. (Like all genres! Sturgeon’s Law!) This isn’t even that different than most of the stuff that bores me — well, better rapping and synths mostly — but it’s got that little something extra.
[7]
Iain Mew: The group I will forever think of as Expected Girls are an unusual proposition. Japanese parent label Avex have embedded them far more in the K-pop industry than, say, Katseye, but there’s a reason that the awards XG have won have tended to be in Japan and not Korea. To me they often sound closer to K-pop but with a slightly different, more straightforward dance sensibility. Here that means deep house pop propelled by confidence and cool, both of which they have in enough quantity to speed through the song’s twists, turns, and sparkly break for the chorus.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: This was lacking in memorable points. Then they put in the “Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto,” and they got me back.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Referencing a Tokugawa-era Samurai and a Y2K-era Will Ferrell character in the span of two lines is incredible stuff — everything else is less memorable fare, and the repeated self-references wear on me a bit. But it’s hard to dislike a piece so effortfully stylish. They’re trying really hard to be cool, and somehow it’s working.
[7]
Leah Isobel: “Gala” lurches through my laptop speakers, its ballroom affectations practically begging for the adjective “cunty.” I respect the beat’s sparkly katana-swings and the song’s relatively freeform energy, but true glamor requires grit, a quality that XG simply do not have.
[5]
Joshua Lu: Ticks all the boxes of an optimal corporate house track: random French words, random runway jargon, sparse instrumental that pushes a constant sense of forward momentum. At times it feels overly labored, especially about halfway through that longwinded second verse, but the overall package still succeeds.
[8]
Will Adams: Does “I just turned the Met Gala into an X-Gala” mean anything? Probably not. But if I stretch, I could equate the prestige pageantry of that event to “Gala”‘s opening — luxe deep house with soft spoken word French — before XG make it their own. That means an electric pinballing between braggadocio rap verses, fashion mantras delivered with ice-cool flair and a showy chorus. If I had to pick which party to attend, the choice would be easy.
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