The Singles Jukebox

Exit…?

[Video]
[4.67]

Jessica Doyle: You know what? I have no complaints. I mean, about the song, yes: LE’s rap doesn’t have the force it needs, Hani seems to be killing time, and I wish there had been a way to reduce the time spent on drops and bring Junghwa’s energy in earlier. But they seem to be relatively content in each other’s company; their biggest current health problem, collectively, is LE’s ankle; they have finger-guns at the ready. Do they deserve better than to have to apologize for the right to seek better contracts for themselves? Of course they deserve better. But right now I’m just glad they haven’t received worse (that we know of).
[5]

Iris Xie: “Oh, the new Dua Lipa song!” is my initial reaction to this. It definitely sounds like “New Rules” to me, but it trades the darkness for being oddly familiar and soothing, due to how it builds upon K-pop’s never-ending appetite for tropical house sounds. The surprise of “ME&YOU” is that the usual harshness of both Hyelin and Solji’s overlapping vocals is nowhere to be found: they’re both mixed with a pleasing, velvety softness, and the instrumentals fall away to a small string section that recalls their earlier single “Every Night.” This small arrangement makes me a little disappointed that they’re most likely disbanding, since I’d wished for more sonic variance other than the grating nature of their vocals for the rest of their songs. But, why does the final verse of “ME&YOU” sound identical to BLACKPINK’s final verse in “Forever Young?” Is this plagiarism or am I missing some final-verse girl group trope? Overall, I never particularly felt like EXID lived up to their potential or interest during all of their singles, but this send-off is a perfectly reliable, fair addition to the K-Pop canon.
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I suppose fans are lucky that EXID even survived this long, given the group only lasted because of the popularity of a pervy fancam. “ME&YOU” is a grim song because it’s a final attempt at relevancy, as made obvious by how this typical (and rather impressively sequenced) EXID song is regrettably centered around a drop that wants to get some of that Blackpink money. I’m reminded of 4Minute’s “Hate”; so many girl groups deserve better than to leave with something so terribly dated.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perfectly acceptable pop song with a 2015 DJ Snake leftover drop grafted on it, in a move so inexplicable that it calls into question the bits that worked in the first place.
[4]

Alfred Soto: I go to EXID for effervescence, and the first third meets the requirement before the arrangement succumbs to every pneumatic trend.
[4]

Anjy Ou: A vaguely samba-esque intro turns into a blaring mess of a club track that makes me want to leave the dancefloor instead of get on it. The falsetto “mee and youu” over the bass and horns is lovely though — I wish they had played with that more instead of leaving me to languish in this post-“Kill This Love” hellscape. I promise if they let this trend die by the end of the summer I will stop shading all the OG K-pop producers on Twitter.
[3]