[Review] BAD – Kim Nam Joo (APINK)

After 3 years and the release of Bird in September 2020, Kim Nam Joo made her solo comeback this week with the new single BAD. In addition to Bird, this solo comeback follows Kim Nam Joo’s departure from IST Entertainment – her home company for for 12 years. Kim Nam Joo is now signed on as an artist under Choi Creative Lab (with 3 other APINK members) and is still apart of APINK. In matter of a fact, APINK will be returning soon as a group!

Like her solo debut, BAD fails to excite me. However, it doesn’t ‘fail to excite’ me in a similar manner that Bird did, but that is my overall conclusion of the new song as it stands. I particularly wanted to clarify that as BAD contains a few elements that levels up the song (relative to her solo debut). Firstly, the instrumentation for BAD is definitely a vibrant take on pop with a brass-heavy instrumentation that gives the track boldness and flair in its background. Secondly, I felt that Kim Nam Joo herself delivered some really strong vocals throughout the track (particularly in the verses), which really complemented BAD‘s instrumentation well. I also like the melodic bridge of the song, thanks to her vocals. Thirdly, I liked the shouty approach to the outro, which summed up the better parts of BAD well. The downfall of BAD is a mixture of an alternative delivery style to what I have highlighted as a positive aspect above and that fact it occurs in the choruses of BAD. The choruses was quite unimaginative thanks to the rap-speak style of delivery opted for. It also dulled all of that energy from the powerfulness of the vocals and instrumentation in the verses. And as the choruses are the central piece to BAD, this dulling effect and dissipating energy is a huge impact on BAD, leading to that ‘fail to excitement’ outcome I mentioned earlier. It did sound like there were attempts to go into an inclining trajectory towards the end of the choruses, which I personally think could have made BAD better and recover from such dulling. But it never got anywhere. Had the choruses been better, BAD could have been a strong comeback and definite improvement from 2020.

When I look at the official English translation of the lyrics of BAD, I can’t help but think they are a messy jumble of one-liners pieced together to hopefully get a message across. It might simply be a lost in translation type of thing, but I can’t figure out what the song is about and what influence it could have the music video. So relying just on the music video, it looks like the video is showing two sides of Kim Nam Joo – both of which are ready to be bad or show off a bad side. Other than that, there was nothing that interesting elemental wise.

Choreography wise, it looked good. It went bold in the bolder parts of the song, such as during that shouty outro. This segment also highlighted stable live vocals from Kim Nam Joo at the same time. The choreography for the duller moments of the song still had attitude to it, and this helped make the performance feel and look well-rounded.

Song – 7/10
Music Video – 7/10
Performance – 8/10
Overall Rating – 7.2/10