July 2026 K-Pop Roundup
I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why this one is so late. Well, several explanations. Instead of narrating, though, allow me to summarize: Maine, friend visit, faceplant on island, 1200-mile drive, job search, car vomit.
Among all that, though, I managed to listen to 143 new k-pop songs. Here are my favorites from July.
Solo
Kihyun, “Borderline”
Group
8Turn, “Stagefright”
Release
fromis_9, Glow ME
What I have learned this year is that I have a huge weakness for the boy group soloists of k-pop’s third generation. Apparently the musical taste of 30-something Korean men and a 30-something American woman raised by a jazz guitarist have something like a 95% overlap. This pop-rock-funk EP from Monsta X’s Kihyun is a great representative sampler of exactly what this sweet spot entails. The bouncy “Borderline” kicks off the album with the perfect amount of edge; but then Kihyun swerves and shows off his fearlessly ambitious vocals on the plaintive ballad “So Good,” which is the EP’s promoted single. “Domino” and “Howling” are also in this pop-rock vein, but the other b-sides (“Stealin’ Air,” “Lazy Day,” and “Late Night Drive”) deliver funkier, sultrier sides of Kihyun’s voice.
I have a “notes” column in my tracking spreadsheet that I use pretty rarely — mostly I just write things like “debut” or “pre-release single” there — but when something unexpected really grabs me I’ll try to make a note. For 8Turn’s single album “[8.x]” I wrote “weirdly good,” and I stand by that. Weirdly good in the most positive way, I swear! The lead single, “Stagefright,” is somehow both sexy and appropriately disorienting. The confidence of the brassy hook dissipates into a smooth but eerie verse, which is interrupted by that brash hook again as soon as it seems like things are going somewhere, and before you know it someone is cooing “make it hurt a little, just a little,” into your ear.
Sidebar: there’s definitely a throughline here with songs like P1Harmony’s “L.O.Y.L.” and TWS’s “Fire Escape,” so much so that I made a little video compilation, beginning, of course, with the original mother of this trend, i-dle’s “Oh My God.”
As I noted in my May roundup, full-length albums are fairly rare in the fast-paced k-pop world. But even rarer is a no-skip, all killer no filler full album. The five remaining members of fromis_9, in their second year under startup label ASND after leaving the HYBE umbrella in 2025, have delivered a bubblegum masterpiece in Glow ME. I was hooked right from the soaring 2010s-esque opener “Eternal,” but if that’s not to your taste you’d have to hate fun to resist the title track “Vitamin ME” — especially if you watch the accompanying music video, which is literally bursting with cheeky commercial parodies and various candy-colored liquids. Other standout tracks include the skewed bossa-nova of “Pocket Treat,” and the Lover-era Taylor Swift-esque confections “Screen Time” and “Why do I cry?”
I swear I’m not pivoting to video but also, if you’re nasty…here’s a video compilation. It’s just that I’m having fun! And I need an outlet because I’m not (classroom) teaching this semester.
The elsewhere section will return next month, I promise.
