Reality show gets a second season, we get another boy band…

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[6.00]

Patrick St. Michel: Fan service comes first on a debut like this. This is, after all, a group put together via reality competition where the viewers got to vote on who made the final lineup. If pop outfits lending supporters a measure of power have taught me anything, it’s that the music often ends up secondary. “Energetic” slingshots vocals back and forth between members so everyone gets enough space, and you can just see an arena roaring when the camera pans to the next singer. Yet the music manages to keep pace with Wanna One’s singing, presenting a persistent beat that highlights the best of the title, when the battle-royal approach to vocals just feels tiring.
[6]

Madeleine Lee: There is a distinction between being so predictable as to be boring and being so predictable as to be exactly right. This song is the latter for me, a clean, well-paced pop-house track that’s pitched just high enough to stay breathless and has enough flair (like Kim Jaehwan’s hypercorrected pronunciation of the title as “enerzetic”) to keep me engaged.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The mild house influence is the sweet spot: it adds propulsion to the lust. Keep it going as energetically as possible, boys!
[7]

Crystal Leww: “Energetic” is fine, but it makes Wanna One feel like Alesso when SEVENTEEN is already at Flume. I understand that EDM-pop is a wide open world, but this is behind, even by pop production standards.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Wish I could feel something more about how K-pop is working its hardest to keep detuned electro-synths in the pop vocabulary, granting their pop-house moments a certain textural comfort in the yawn-inducing banality this approach has been recycling. The raps here are a bit melodramatically presented for their limited appeal, the main piano line might be one of the more basic house lines out there, and in general “Energetic” actually falls more flat than it’d like to admit. But hardly an effort without merits.
[4]

Alex Clifton: I’m a sucker for ’90s Eurodance pianos, which “Energetic” has in droves. I hear shades of some of the poppier boy groups — SHINee and Seventeen specifically come to mind — and my one complaint would be that the song tries so hard to sound like other groups that I have trouble discerning what’s so original about Wanna One. If you’re going to make your mark as an idol group, you’ve got to have a memorable sound, and this might not have been the best track to establish that identity with. I can let that annoyance go for three minutes of dancing, though.
[6]