The Top Three K-Pop Songs of April 2025

5 hours ago 3

At the end of each month, I look back at my three favorite title tracks by K-pop artists. I take my own ratings into account, but there’s a bit of wiggle room as certain songs tend to grow or fade.

April 2025 Overall Thoughts

Oof. What a month. K-pop in 2025 hasn’t been overwhelmingly awesome so far, but we were on an upward trajectory through March. Typically, April ushers in the industry’s spring season and we start getting comebacks positioned for summer ubiquity. Instead, this April was well below average, delivering one clunker after another.

We reverted back to some of the industry’s worst trends: drained-of-its-color “beigepop” for the girls, shout-chant posturing for the boys. A huge swath of April’s releases could comfortably slot into these two sonic archetypes, and as someone who listens to every new release in detail it’s both exhausting and uninspiring to hear slight variations of the same template over and over again. I know the K-pop industry loves following (and following… and following…) trends, but I swear it used to be more musically adventurous than this.

Because of this sense of sameness, songs that stood out or delivered a punchier energy instantly found a place on my playlist. I know the comments were mixed on this blog, but I absolutely adore TWS’s most recent take on their signature melodies with Countdown. It’s easily my most played song of the month and offered the kind of bombastic, singalong hooks I tend to covet. I also want to spotlight the newly-debuted Close Your Eyes, who took a similarly melodic approach but in a completely different way. By drawing upon a mid-to-late-2000’s r&b sound, they instantly set themselves apart from the crowd. I’d love to see more of this from K-pop. The genre itself doesn’t even matter as long as the songwriting is strong and the sound isn’t just a regurgitation of what every other K-pop act is peddling.

For the first time this year, there were actually more J-pop highlights than K-pop. While I couldn’t even cobble together a top three for J-pop in March, I had more than enough choices this month. It’s been a slow start for J-pop in 2025, so I’m hoping this represents the beginning of a needed shift.

Looing forward to May, I’m hopeful that K-pop’s prospects will also strengthen. We’ve got big comebacks on the way from RIIZE, BOYNEXTDOOR, Seventeen, Jin and many others. At least some of these are bound to hit, right? Right?!?

Month Cumulative Rating: 7.5

(compiled by averaging the scores of every K-pop review from this month)