Widening the pop trading gap between South Korea and China even further…

[Video][Website]
[5.60]

Patrick St. Michel: In a bid for even larger record sales across Asia, Korean pop-squad Super Junior created a spin-off unit called Super Junior M which focuses squarely on the Chinese marketplace (the “M” stands for “Mandarin”). That’s fine and dandy, but what’s really concerning is that “Break Down” is also an attempt to introduce brostep flavor into the Chinese pop marketplace. That seems like something America should be doing, not the K-Pop industry. Obama, make Skrillex the official East Asian dubstep ambassador and save them from this over-sugared attempt at wub.
[4]

Kat Stevens: Dancing around in their wellies they remind me of the Countryside Alliance Crew having a rave-hoedown.
[6]

Iain Mew: It feels inevitable to end up comparing and contrasting this with Girls’ Generation’s “I Got a Boy” as a couple of comments on that did, and not just because the two SM labelmates released the first two 2013 albums I listened to. Both are fast-paced and action-packed songs which use heavy electronic elements, though nothing in “I Got a Boy” coded as obviously dubstep as the various belches and revving noises of “Break Down”. The difference that makes me like “Break Down” the better of the two is that it has more structure, actually quite traditional one with a single great chorus, and spreads out its heaviness across that structure as a constant new source of excitement. It gets a great momentum from bending and stretching the underlying thread without ever snapping it completely.
[8]

Alfred Soto: From the sonic crunch of the first chorus to the melodic sweetness of the second verse is an impressive transition, less unwieldy than, oh, Taylor Swift’s dubstep dabbling.
[6]

Jer Fairall: The synths sputter and squelch as if in the midst of an actual break down, but the singers’ maudlin delivery suggests more of a carefully rehearsed brood. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: The brostep bits sound like violent indigestion. It’s uncomfortable. Ominous gurbles and grumbles: if the breakdown is occurring in the health of your colon, SJM, I get it. Otherwise, there’s a reason why no one makes posse-cut trance songs.
[3]

Will Adams: The myriad bass sounds – some stuttering, some screaming, some tumbling up and down the scale – are popular tropes in the heavy electro house of producers like Porter Robinson, Spencer & Hill, and early Skrillex. Despite house’s dominance of pop in the last few years, these abrasive synths rarely make it into a Top 40 song. Hearing it in “Break Down” is a nice treat, and it works so well that I don’t even mind the obligatory dubstep breakdown. I just wish the boys’ voices carried the same grit.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Break Down” implements its brostep transformer squeaks in two different ways. At points, it uses these gestating movements to burst through the song’s structure, birthing sometimes-lush sounds — like the split second in the first bars of the chorus, when the chords shudder and jive in a way that feels similar to swingbeat. Elsewhere, the aggro bass pops are busy-busy decoration for a song as weightless as cotton candy.
[5]

Anthony Easton: This sounds too well-ordered, and too formulaic to be symbolic of a complete and utter breakdown. How they sing “breakdown” is kind of charming though. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: It’s not like this is the only kind of music – or even the only kind of pop music – I like, but sometimes when you hear this stuff you think just for a minute, why doesn’t the ‘Western’ world just give up? We have nothing to compete with this. And this isn’t even the really good stuff!
[7]