EXO – Let Me In
From Kayla, a K-pop R&B ballad lots of us welcome in…

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Kayla Beardslee: I love staring at the ocean. I’m the kind of person who always has some kind of distraction running through my head. I’m never completely comfortable in my own body; I’m always compulsively planning ahead for something in my mind. But I’m so small in comparison to the horizon that it makes everything go quiet. I can watch and watch and watch the waves and the view will give me almost nothing back, yet it stays in motion just enough that I don’t want to look anywhere else. There’s comfort in giving yourself up to that kind of all-consuming emptiness. You could maybe say the same about stargazing; the stars, though, are pretty, static points of light that inspire very theoretical daydreams. The ocean is right there on the edge of the everyday, reaching out against the shore, pulsing not with life but with the space between it, ready to grasp and swallow you down into the darkness if you lose yourself enough to give it the chance. You can look at the gray, shifting surface and easily imagine what it might feel like to drown. Or maybe you don’t have to imagine. “Let Me In,” EXO’s first full-group track in four and a half years, is a song about helping someone who’s been dragged too far down into the waves. “Vanishing into the dark, you’re gone,” it begins; “Struggling, but even if you sink, it’s fine / Make your way to me through the waves.” As the members of EXO reassure their partner that they’re not alone, they sing with such precision that you can almost hold onto the syllables — after all, they want you to not let go, to not lose hope even if the world is cast in nothing but gray and blue. This song crept up on me in the months after its release even before I decided what it was about, but one night, it clicked as a song about depression. “Gotta let me in, you’re the ocean,” goes the chorus. Inside you is an encroaching darkness and coldness that reaches too deep to disappear. But as the weight of the water presses down and obscures everything else in the distance, EXO’s vocals cut through like a lifeline, strength and warmth emanating from their expressions of devotion (“Want to drift off in your soft embrace / If possible, hold me and let me in”). It’s not that this song resonated with me because a partner helped me out of depression. I just hear the soft melody in the bridge, rising and falling in time with the waves, and for a moment everything makes sense. It isn’t a promise that things are going to get better; maybe things aren’t even going to be okay. “Let Me In” ends not with a grand vow to fight or change or reject these feelings — how could one person oppose something so huge? — but with a simple reminder that there’s someone by their side ready to save them from drowning. “Fall into you, the bluest water / ‘Cause you’re my ocean,” Chen and Baekhyun breathe out in the closing lines: no matter how deep your sadness, someone out there will understand it, willingly dive in, and not falter in their love. I don’t know if it’s healing or hypnosis, but while the ocean takes and takes and takes from me, I choose to also get something back. Against its vastness, every insignificant, anxious, unsure inch of me suddenly feels so much more important and real. I feel small; I feel aware of myself; I feel human.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Genuinely suave in a way that most pop music simply is not. The charm is studied and practiced, but that’s an argument for EXO rather than against. Effort is sexy!
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Michael Hong: SM Groups’ Korean Singles, 2023: Memories > Spicy > ISTJ > Perfume > Fact Check > Drama > Cream Soda > Down > Let Me In > Broken Melodies > Talk Saxy > Chill Kill > Get a Guitar > Hard > Stamp on It > Hear Me Out > Ay-Yo > Golden Age > Baggy Jeans
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Anna Katrina Lockwood: Man, this EXO comeback was a bit of a shitshow. Between CBX’s lawsuit against SM, Kai’s obviously unanticipated enlistment timing, and the general clusterfuck in SM Entertainment business affairs, the vibes felt off. Nonetheless, EXO’s surprisingly litigious, nearly unassailable vocal line are persistently on their game, and nowhere more so than on “Let Me In”. There’s not really any new way I can think to express that Chen, Baekhyun and D.O. are better singers than everyone, but I have a new appreciation for the balance the trio has, each with strengths that don’t step on the others. The three thrive in this low-tension ambience, meandering amongst the vaporous pad synths, occasionally pinned down by the pleasingly erratic bassline. The other EXO who absolutely nailed this sort of thing in the past few years is of course Kai, and it’s a real shame he wasn’t around for promotions. It’s also part of the reason that “Cream Soda”, the glossier title track, felt a little flat — it was built for Kai, and then he wasn’t there. You can put Baekhyun in all the pink fur jackets you want but you ain’t gonna pull the wool over my eyes! I just can’t, uh, fight the feeling that EXO isn’t anyone’s priority these last few years, and this release didn’t convince me otherwise. But “Let Me In” at the very least plays to their vocal strengths, with predictably appealing results.
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Tara Hillegeist: Even now, in the age of anxious, hesitant production choices, and as a result the shrinking aesthetic palette from which Korean pop stars can choose how they want their next comeback to sound, it’s still a rare, deflating surprise when a single releases and the worst part in a bad way is the rap. Chanyeol’s lead-laced bars kill the whole vibe like he’s showing up to the dance rehearsal in cement shoes. The whole song feels sorely spent for breath after that sodden, damming shuffle of a verse, when everything else about this cry-me-a-river-along implicitly calls for a perfect stormcloud instead.
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Ian Mathers: What do you call it when you don’t quite attain the heights of the quiet storm genre? Quiet drizzle? Luckily I love an overcast day.
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Nortey Dowuona: The lush keyboard and bass is lovely, but the drum programming is so bland and largely invisible; it boggles the mind as to why it’s buried all the way back there. As for the boys themselves, CHEN’s delicious tenor feels the most distinct, yet they all comfortably harmonize together. The rapping from Chanyoel feels staccato and jittery, Sehun lilts behind it, and Baekhyun delivers the excellent closure to the final chorus. But overall “Let Me In” feels anonymous, a warm gulp of raspberry tea that I enjoy then forget forever.
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Rachel Saywitz: As with most K-pop ballads that end up in my ears these days, I struggle to find what’s new about this one–EXO has plenty of slower, groovier songs that I’d rather listen to. But damn, if it isn’t nice hearing one of K-pop’s best vocal lines again. Baekhyun, D.O., and Chen can make the drabbiest melodies sing, and they stretch and strain on a chorus that might otherwise have no heft to it.
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Michelle Myers: There’s a faint outline of a great EXO B-side in here, and Baekhyun’s vocal tone will always stir something within me. But I can’t help but hear the exhaustion and resignation in their performances. It’s a bummer.
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Brad Shoup: They croon of unfathomable depths, yet they descend on the same cloud that every pop R&B artist leases.
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Katherine St Asaph: It’s last call at the skating rink, 10 PM at the school dance, 2000 when “This I Promise You” and “Shape of Your Heart” didn’t seem like they’d be the last megahit boyband ballads for a long, long time.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: It’s just a crazy thing to be alive, man. I think about that every time I hear a song like this, because if there is anything that has survived all of K-pop’s many changes, it is this reverence for the melodramatic ballad. That in itself is a complex web. Contemporary tracks like “Let Me In” are rooted in American R&B, a fact that can be traced to Korean American trio Solid finding major success in the ’90s but also to the US military’s undying presence in Korea. Then there’s the rhythm of the rapped verses — I hear the conversational tone of artists like Zion.T, who only sing-rap like that because of the distance Koreans have from American rap music. And then the decorum of the chorus, how those vocals soar with tremendous belief in the power of gentleness — you could bring up boy bands from around the world, but I hear in the Korean language a specific passion that overflows even to the English lyrics. “Gotta let me in,” we hear, a suggestion that reads like a command. You want to agree because it’s firm and direct and tender all at once. And really, you have to: So much of the world is fucked beyond belief, and the fact that the past 100 years of Korean pop music is the product of a nation finding their voice in the midst of imperialism and occupation, the fact that countless Korean artists and music critics are constantly interrogating what it takes for our art to “be Korean”… you want to believe that something new can happen when people come together. I think about “Morning Dew,” one of the most famous protest songs in Korean music history, and how it is rooted in sadness. “Leaving all my sorrow behind,” goes the final line; “I am going now.” That sentiment is not so far off from the one here. “You’re the ocean” is an affirmation that we’re bigger than we realize, that we can go beyond a small, oppressive understanding of who we are and can be. All my favorite Korean musicians taught me that, from Seo Taiji to Shin Hae Chul to Yoon Sang, from Dalpalan to Choi Joonyong to Sumin. EXO offer much the same, and it makes me feel connected to so much Korean history in the process. What a joy.
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