The Singles Jukebox

Breaking up: it’s like sugar sometimes…

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Rachel Saywitz: NewJeans has found a comfortable home in the production of DJ and electro-trot producer 250, whose musical style has become so singular that I’d start putting him up there with some of the other K-pop producing greats like Brave Brothers, the late Shinsadong Tiger, or Sweetune. His method continues to work well on “How Sweet”: adding a little shimmering twist to American club genres (Miami bass in this case), seamless transitions from section to section, and the light vocal touch of every girl’s vocals. But, as with the greats, I sense a slight loss of luster with the constant repetition. How many underground genres is 250 going to fish out of the Western world’s murky waters to can up and ship out with a shiny new label? The catches are going to dry up eventually.
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Kayla Beardslee: NewJeans’ early singles smashed, bringing them ridiculous and unprecedented success for a first-year K-pop rookie group, because they delivered masterfully crafted pop songs in deceptively simple packaging. “Hype Boy” plows through enough memorable hooks for an entire album in a minute and a half, yet sounds so breezy and youthfully optimistic that the music doesn’t feel like work at all. Beneath the soft swells and whispers of “Ditto” is an instrumental that has a beautifully subtle touch with intimacy and a topline that stays in constant motion even as it tantalizingly holds itself back. In comparison, “How Sweet” is more of an underachieving graduate of the Tortured Poets school of songwriting. In each section of the song, they pick one melody with a limited dynamic range, hammer it into the ground, then tick the box and move on. For a Coca-Cola ad, it’s pretty flat. 
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Mark Sinker: Chirpy song about how breaking up with u is great and also v easy bcz u suck and I never liked u! Happily the real-world backdrop (MASSIVE INDUSTRY DRAMA pitting label against manager) cannot possibly ground this as a metaphor. The delivery turns the tale of the change from oops non-allegory into smilingly blank-faced stonewall.
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Iain Mew: They stretch simplicity as a virtue further than ever, relying almost entirely on immaculate floaty vibes. The almost is crucial, though; the “…now that I’m without you” kicker adds just enough bitterness to keep this from 
feeling completely blank.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: “How Sweet” is one of the most powerful kiss-offs we’ve had in years because it treats the end of a relationship as something so effortless, so natural, “like biting an apple.” Even when lines are acerbic (“toxic lover, you’re no better”), they are delivered with the exact amount of lift needed to signal both disgust and nonchalance. NewJeans do not care about this ex anymore, and they wield their restraint with grace; this is living well as the best revenge, and the song is potent because it feels like mist on a hot summer day. Producer 250 has always known how to excavate the potential of a minimalist pop song, and he’s found an especially strong avenue here with the skeleton of an Atlanta bass track. The regional style (and specifically the Ghost Town DJ’s track “My Boo”) has had a large impact on K-pop since “Body Party” got big, but 250 makes it a more congenial affair: the hi-hats are low in the mix, the handclaps have more pop than the kick, and it all feels muted so the bubbly synth melodies and percussion—the latter approximating the “Triggerman” sample used in bounce classics—can flutter about. “How Sweet” is the most everyday that NewJeans has sounded, and it’s all the more biting for it.
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Ian Mathers: It’s devastating enough to get a “I’m doing better without you” message delivered with such nonchalant cool, but to make it a bop too? Really drives the implied “I probably didn’t care that much in the first place” home, ouch.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A very NewJeansian take on the break up-come down song; it’s a harder feeling to make sound giddy, but they pull it off here. The fragments jutting out from the sing-talk (“like biting an apple”; “no drama, it’s good karma”; “little demon in my storyline“ most of all) are thrilling and deranged, the kind of phrases that become involuntary mantras and mutterings when you make your way out of something all-consuming and are faced with the shock of the new. Most of the writing about NewJeans centers on their musical trappings, but the Miami bass riffs here are more perfunctory than their prior dalliances with drum-n-bass and Jersey club. That’s not to say that it’s a bad song — that bassline itself, rubbery and grooving, is gorgeous — but that it shares less with the perfect grooves that “OMG” and “Ditto” than first appears.
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Oliver Maier: Unusual for NewJeans both in that it is kind of a retread (think “OMG” 2: Not As Good) and that the performances are really quite listless. The thing about girl groups from anywhere in the world is that their songs tend to implode the moment it sounds like they aren’t having fun.
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Jonathan Bradley: There’s not the great shock of the new provided by genre experiments like “Super Shy” or “Ditto,” but the R&B-lite of “How Sweet” gets some extra mileage from burbling percussion runs and photon-light electro textures. Switching between English and Korean lines in the hook is smart songwriting as well as smart globalization; it adds variation to a melody that threatens to run out of ideas after a mere three-and-a-half minutes. 
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Michael Hong: Initially put off by how weary the vocals sound — NewJeans have always been low-key, but they’ve never sounded so spent. But it starts making sense when you consider that NewJeans are just as much about the experience of sharing these milestones as they are living them. Backed by a laser show of synths, “How Sweet” is about convincing yourself that you’re okay after a heartbreak and proving it to your friends. This exhaustion makes the sharper moments more effective: the wistfulness of “it’s like biting an apple” longs harder, and the snarky “I’ll see you out” that closes the track is a truly satisfying line read. With every chorus, the bitter tartness lessens and the the sweetness pops brighter.
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Alfred Soto: The relaxed sensuality is what I wanted from this week’s Tinashe track. The melodies are sticky and sweet.
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Nortey Dowuona: The drum programming is a bouncy, yet flimsy kick snare pattern full of glittery lasers and clinking closed hi-hats. At first, it overwhelms you, with the rising hit arriving every four bars and doubling during the post chorus, but once you pay attention to the looping, ghostly synth melody, you feel toward a handhold in the wind.
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Isabel Cole: I get so excited by the aliens-attacking space-laser sounds at the beginning, and then it all mellows out to make room for an uninspiring vocal line delivered uninspiringly. Things perk up a little in the chorus (I remain a sucker for handclaps!), but unfortunately the actual melody continues to be the worst part of the song, to the extent that I think I’d prefer an instrumental version.
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Katherine St. Asaph: The melody on the verses sounds like something off PinkPantheress’s Heaven Knows, which is some real influencer-becomes-influenced ouroboros shit. But “How Sweet” settles into a chorus that’s undeniably itself, frenetic but small: kind of like “Let the Music Play” recreated by one of those miniscule Helmacron ships from Animorphs in tiny zaps and little plinks. And I do mean “settles”: there’s less fizz in the pop than there could have been, and NewJeans’ vocals range from effortless to affectless, unbothered to unengaging.
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TA Inskeep: I’m absolutely here for NewJeans giving us a little bit of ecstasy. If this kicks off a revival of second-wave freestyle, I’ll be very happy. (Someone call Sabrina Carpenter to the white courtesy phone, stat!)
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “How Sweet” is the most subdued and pedestrian newjeans have sounded. The beeps and blorps and percussion taste sweet, but the vocals are bitter and dull. But when the production has so many dynamic flourishes, and the meta-narrative around the group is so interesting, the score floor is high. 
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