Recent Girl Group Releases

Two underrated girl groups came back recently, and they are Lovelyz and Gugudan. Both of their comeback singles attracted a decent amount of views on YouTube, but they were out of almost all charts within a couple of days after their songs' releases.

I honestly believe that the groups' performances in the charts did not represent the quality of their comebacks very well, so I will take some time to go over the various pros/cons of their singles.

First up is Lovelyz with their single "WoW!". The song may sound a bit unconventional on the first listen, and this nature of the song is what I believe led to the song's failure on the charts. Lovelyz's previous songs such as "Ah Choo" and "Destiny" did not deviate much from the average cute and bubbly K-Pop girl group song, and both songs stayed on the chart for a couple of weeks. "WoW!", on the other hand, was eliminated from all K-music charts within a matter of days.



I had thought that Lovelyz's comeback was a failure on my first couple of listens, but I realized that the song was actually very catchy after several listens. The lyrics are well-written, and the chorus and the bridge were very well developed musically. It's quite the tragedy that many people didn't give this song a second chance.

Next up is Gugudan and their single "A Girl Like Me." Unlike Lovelyz, I had no skepticism of the excellence of Gugudan's single. Even the 10-second snippet of the single included in the teaser video got me repeating the lyrics for hours. In one corner of my mind, I was slightly afraid that the full song wouldn't sound as promising as the teaser snippet as 90% of all K-Pop songs are, but my doubts were cleared when the full single was released. I assume that many people shared my beliefs, because "A Girl Like Me" garnered over 2 million views on YouTube within the first 2 days of release, which is quite a lot for a newbie group like Gugudan.



However, the 2 million views was the only sign of success for Gugudan's comeback. They made it into the charts only for a couple of minutes. After 2 million views, almost everyone stopped watching Gugudan's music video. It's a mystery why a song like "A Girl Like Me" ended up flopping, but one speculation that I can make based on some of the comments in the YouTube video is that people simply stopped caring about Gugudan after one or two listens because Gugudan isn't a popular, well-established group. It's quite sad to see songs like Twice's "Knock Knock" become chart toppers when the song noticeably has inferior lyrics and production quality compared to "WoW!" and "A Girl Like Me."