Seventeen are celebrating an enormous ten 12 months anniversary right this moment. They have been widespread proper out of the gate, however few may have predicted simply how huge they’ve grow to be. I bear in mind staying up very late to look at the premiere of their first music video (the ebullient Adore U) ten years in the past, however I’ve grown extra distant from their music in recent times. New single Thunder matches strongly inside my EDM-loving wheelhouse, however misses the prospect to measure as much as their finest work.

I’m so completely happy to listen to huge membership beats again in Ok-pop. This vitality has been missed and if it takes a bunch as influential as Seventeen to totally re-popularize it, I’m grateful for his or her service. Nonetheless, songs like Thunder and aespa’s 2024 hit Whiplash are lacking a significant factor: The place’s the melody? As somebody who listens to a ton of dance music, I do know simply how simply this style can grow to be faceless and generic. That’s often on account of an absence of melodic heft. I’m a grasping listener. I need huge dancefloor vitality and an equally huge refrain.

On this regard, Thunder sputters. It doesn’t really feel like a lot of a music in any respect. As an alternative, a sequence of spoken catchphrases populate the thumping instrumental. For a monitor with such persistently excessive vitality, all the things is unusually flat. That is most blatant through the hook, which opts to retreat right into a minimalist, spelled-out repetition of the title accented by a whistled loop and adopted by a haphazard melodic coda that principally spins its wheels. For such a giant membership monitor, the manufacturing is oddly muzzled as effectively. The EQ of the combo feels very hesitant, as if there’s a full terabyte of knowledge pressured to stuff itself right into a tiny 32gb flash drive. The place’s the scope and ambition? And with out a music construction that permits for construct and climax, Thunder ends with out ceremony. It’s bizarre. On paper, I ought to be shedding my thoughts over this music. In actuality, it barely leaves an impression.

Grade: C