The Singles Jukebox

To follow up “Guess,” here’s something at the other end of the horny axis…

[Video]
[5.38]

Kayla Beardslee: The depth of the BTS vault in the last year has been genuinely impressive; the results have been mixed in vision and execution. “Who” is a song driven totally by the topline — having even one or two moments where the melody pauses to let the music riff in conversation with it would be nice — but something feels really off-putting about the vocal production that’s meant to be carrying the song. I can sense Jimin’s mouth moving with every syllable, yet it also sounds like he recorded his performance from the back of a cave. I’m a lover of ambitious K-pop tracks, but the instrumental here doesn’t feel very K-pop at all, in that it picks one idea and sticks with it for the entire song without changing up. To be fair, “Who” is at least a year old and was recorded as a stopgap to tide fans over during BTS’s enlistment period, so realistically it’s not the time to expect Jimin to release anything fresh or ambitious. (Did anyone else listen to that J-Hope EP, though? That was fun.)
[5]

Alfred Soto: I wish the former BTS singer the best, which includes better tunes than ones that ape “Like I Love You”‘s plastic acoustic funk and Ed Sheeran’s fan dance of sincerity.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Jon Bellion came a long way: from playing switch hitter on Logic songs to writing bops for the Korean Beatles, from dropping “All Time Low” to rescuing Justin Bieber, Halsey and Miley Cyrus from all time lows, from playing on beat pads in Long Island to touring the world with twenty one pilots. But he is only human, and he makes mistakes, such as putting in a 5 count in the second verse to fill time. (Pete Nappi has much to answer for.) Jimin boldly puts his thin tenor to work trying to sell this, though, and delivers a surprisingly courageous run, a sterling performance that commits to the 2003-era bit. (Tenroc, responsible for the guitar licks and additional synth riffs and drum programming, probably heard that run and rued the day he willingly entered that other guy’s studio session.) If this is the first Jimin solo offering, I will take it.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: “Who” bursts forth with the energy of a dancefloor filler, but Jimin’s feathery vocal points toward an underlying R&B framework that is more delicate and compelling than the airless production allows for. With acoustic guitar stutters that call to mind early Justin Timberlake and a gasped tenor that suggests the emergency of The Weeknd (if not the skeeviness), there’s no shortage of things to like about this. See also: a “why-why-why” interjection that’s strong enough to be a hook but sticks harder for only appearing once. For a song drawn with stark emotional and musical lines, though, “Who” would be easier to appreciate if the negative spaces were emptier.
[7]

Michael Hong: “Who” is surprisingly slick, even if it can’t seem to decide whether it wants Jimin to look romantic or erotic. The better part of this leans toward the former with its restraint, ready to fall in love but still waiting for the right person. It’s the latter part that’s hard to stomach; the showy high-notes are grating, and that heavy bass sets its sights on something more explicit, souring the flirtatious ambience of the guitar melody.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Exquisitely corny — every guitar strum and each of Jimin’s treble-y wails signals a grand ambition to sentimental pop greatness that is only fleetingly met by the threadbare song undergirding “Who.” I’m sympathetic; it’s a song about love in a gnostic sense, where the actual existence of an external one to be loved is less important than the internal knowledge that the heart has something to wait for. Yet this concept proves brittle in Jimin’s hands, less a romantic epic and more a yearning vamp, never quite reaching the heights it wants to exceed.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: The degree of fanservice here — who is his heart waiting for? Is it someone he’s never met, someone who lives thousands of miles away, oh my God could it be you? — is so shameless and OTT it’s genuinely remarkable. So is the old-fashioned PG-rated romanticism — for all the hyperpop vocal smear and sophistipop instrumentation details (that synth glissando!), this sounds not far off from, like, Enrique Iglesias or the A*Teens, and somehow makes that refreshing.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: It’s OK to be nostalgic for 2003, but this isn’t any of the things I’m nostalgic for, but rather quite a few things that need to stay back in memories — “Like I Love You” rhythm, outrageously piercing hooks and chords and melodies that remind me of not-very-distinguished British boybands I became familiar with through my trawls through the Eurocharts back in the day.
[3]

Iain Mew: Something in the melody and the way it steps into the stutter of the backing keeps making me think of JLS’s “Beat Again.” With Jimin’s blasé commitment to expending nights, his mind, and the world on someone he hasn’t even identified yet, it might even be a prologue to the same relationship that JLS offer the batshit one-sided epilogue to. 
[5]

Mark Sinker: The two poles of Jimin’s public being are (a) that he graduated from GLOBAL CYBER UNIVERSITY (as others did also, tbf) and (b) the preternaturally sensible haircut he sports in his Wikipedia photo (warning: this may change). Here he solves future couple-dom as if it’s a data-processing problem, addressed with both vim and angst: “someone she can count on – 1 2 3 4 5!” Meanwhile I saw family cars in riot-flame off the corner of the square where I lived, and here he slides and glides through a stage-set of much the same as if this semi-infinite numerated care had no weight to it at all.
[9]

Ian Mathers: You know pop criticism/fandom is in a healthy place right now, because I have the passing thought “I wonder if I’ll be hounded off the internet for this” when my primary visceral reaction to “Who” is “did they not notice that the vocals and/or vocal production is offputting?” The song itself is fine, if a bit generic, but there’s something a bit too trebly or piercing for me, and since the singing is unsurprisingly front and centre it’s hard to get past. 
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I’m not super picky when it comes to audio mixing, but something about the way that Jimin’s voice is tuned sounds so deeply off that I actually checked to see if my headphones were malfunctioning.
[2]

Dave Moore: Sleek, hyperprocessed vocals, spiritually closer to “Believe” than hyperpop, against a transnational production that sounds like it’s from everywhere and nowhere. It provided a fun global guessing game until I cheated and checked the credits. Huh, probably more interesting than anything I’ve heard from BTS, good for him.
[6]