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[6.50]

Katherine St Asaph: Breathless, concentrated joy; I take back a good two-thirds of my Elon Musk and Grimes jokes.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Blockberry Creative realizing that a ton of LOONA fans love Grimes after Odd Eye Circle’s “Loonatic” has resulted in a collaboration that is little more than a shameless attempt at generating buzz in the international sphere. That aside, “Love4eva” is a paltry “Very Very Very” imitation whose driving beat does little to inject the song with the energy it sorely needs. The titular fairy tale hook is the beginning and end of the song’s attempts at doe-eyed infatuation, and it’s a shame considering E-Tribe have been able to sell this bubblegum premise so successfully on songs like “Gee” and “Bling Bling.” Like the post-“Very Very Very” track “Likey,” “Love4eva” aims for a multi-pronged kitchen sink approach to songwriting, but the pre-chorus and wonky breakdown here reveal that there’s little consideration for how these individual parts are meant to cohere, musically and otherwise. If “Girl Front” was a beautiful assemblage of the Odd Eye Circle girls’ tracks and sensibilities, “Love4eva” is the opposite: a flattening of the personalities that were able to shine on tracks like “Heart Attack” and “Egoist.”
[4]

Iain Mew: It doesn’t have quite the same wow factor as “Gee” — the second, third, fourth love story doesn’t have the same giddy thrill as the first, whoever is doing that introduction. Doesn’t mean it can’t still be sweet as anything, though.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Pure sucrose in the veins, and so well syncopated that it makes the competition look emptily garish.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: Anyone else creeped out by this video? It’s not just the early-20th-century lesbian tropes — though I do wonder what came first, the video concept or the choice of “Olivia” as a stage name — but the combination of schoolgirl outfits and knee socks with waist-high shots, petal-biting slo-mo, and very red lipstick. (For the curious: Yves is 21, Chuu 18, Go Won 17, and Olivia Hye 16.) Which gets to the disconnect I feel between what I see in LOONA and what LOONA’s fiercest advocates see in the group. A lot of us, when we latch onto groups, want to say that the system is awful but this group is different: so BTS isn’t K-pop, and Twice is actually engaging in subtle critique, and yours truly spent years hoping that Infinite was going to be able to inject something more personal and meaningful into their songs. Which they actually did, with “Begin Again,” but there I go, none of y’all want or need to hear that argument. And on to LOONA: I get that the girls are sweethearts, and that Blockberry Creative has been able to take the money laundered lavished upon the project and emerge with interesting and skilled and compelling songs, and that “Love4eva” takes the “Gee” formula and complicates it just enough with chirps and statics and slight tempo changes to make for a fun listen. But I don’t get magical. I don’t get different.
[5]

Juan F. Carruyo: The “forbidden affairs of the heart” literary genre is classic song fodder and if the closed captions generated by YouTube are even remotely close to the real thing; then the lyrics are pretty good, containing this awesome line: “Even my kidney is pounding.” A fast, cheap beat carries the tune, but the youthful exuberance exhibited by LOONA/yyxy is the clincher.
[7]