Ring on the bell, make it sing sing sing

Mix 33: An EP's worth of T-pop, plus Vietnam, Japan, Turkish espresso, an indie before/after, and at least one (maybe two?) A.I. monstrosities

I’ve embarked on a deep dive into T-pop this week. I don’t know if “ferment” is the right word for what’s happening in Thailand; I would say that they are in slow and steady development of a competitive global pop sound, not riding a do-no-wrong genre/scene juggernaut. From my generalist vantage (i.e. hearing the stuff that reaches my ears without having to do a “deep dive”), progress has been linear for years, simultaneously across several genres — rap, pop, and an alt/indie scene. But I’m no expert on this stuff (see below for folks closer to that), I just try to listen to as much music as I can find and trust that my instincts are usually OK.

To that end, Glenn McDonald’s partial reboot of Every Noise, New Releases by Genre DIY, has been extremely helpful.¹ You can follow instructions for how to use it here — you will need a Spotify account for its API credentials. (For what it’s worth, I am usually hopeless with stuff like this and was still able to do it.) If you know how a genre is tagged in Spotify — I use Exportify to get genre tags from previous mixes — you can plug it in and you’ll end up with a list that looks like this:

Some technical stuff: You can hear short previews of songs by clicking the yellow links on the right, or go to the track page on Spotify by clicking the hyperlinks. You can do multiple genre searches with a plus sign (+) (something I haven’t tried yet), and you can use an asterisk (*) next to your phrase to include genres similar to the phrase you searched. For label searches, use an ampersand (@) symbol in the search and include any spaces in the label name (e.g., @nyege nyege tapes). You can also change the timeline of your genre search by putting a date range in the URL with a daily format “&date=2024-08-29” or yearly format “&date=2024.”

This is what my “t-pop girl group” search for 2024 looked like:

Not much else to report — you may notice I’ve cleaned up the site design a bit, made a bad logo, and dropped the “No” in the title. (I have no plans yet to remove the “the.”) I’ve also gone back and tagged all previous mixes from 2024 and 2023. So instead of linking to each previous mix, you can now just follow the tag at the “previous mixes” link below.

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Previous 2024 mixes

MIX 33: RING ON THE BELL, MAKE IT SING SING SING

1. Gen1es: Lucky Bell

2. KYLINZ: วาร์ปไปหาเธอ (191)

3. Fairy Dolls: แกง (Thai Curry)

4. EMPRESS: Blah Blah Blah

5. Paintbrush: AIWS

6. Bowlmm: Cut Cut Cut (อีกทีได้มั้ย)

Let’s kick things off with a whole EP’s worth of T-pop songs. I started by pulling from a wonderful overview of Thai pop at Ryo Miyauchi’s This Side of Japan, with blurbs from Ryo, Kayla Beardslee, and Patrick St. Michel. The opening two tracks come from that roundup, where I learned that Gen1es are the winners of a big Thai reality singing competition and KYLINZ are, as I suspected, referencing the Thai equivalent of 9-1-1. (After fact-checking this, I’ve also learned that for the Tourist Police, you dial 1155.)

I liked Kayla’s observation in a blurb about a near-miss for this week’s mix, “Ooh!” by PP Krit:

I say this with lots of love, but some T-pop artists aren’t great singers at all, and they have to make it up for it with total directness in their performance, daring you to be interested anyway as they pull out production tricks and rely on confidence to sell whatever is going on around them.

She’s right—a sense of getting personality across by any means necessary is definitely part of what’s drawing my attention to T-pop; there is something hungry about it. I still hear plenty of good K-pop groups and songs, but I’ve also long felt at sea in the huge number of competent mediocrities. It’s currently easier to follow T-pop, and I’m getting a sense of the kind of leave-it-all-on-the-floor boldness I was hearing across K-pop c. 2011-2015.

The other blurbs in that roundup paint a picture of T-pop as influenced sonically and culturally by K-pop as a transnational pop sound (including, in Gen1es’ case, production from veteran K-pop producers), but also indebted to J-pop, with Thai acts increasingly featured in the Japanese pop circuit. A few songs not on today’s mix, like Mirai Mirai’s “Octa,” are much closer to J-pop.

The rest of the tracks in this suite are from my year-to-date search on Every Noise, where I found Fairy Dolls, EMPRESS, Paintbrush, and Bowlmm, along with many others that I’ve started to gather in a separate T-pop playlist.

7. Kito f. Kah-Lo, Baauer, Brazy: Take Your Vibes and Go

Australian producer Kito finally manages to cobble together enough personality around Kah-Lo to almost replicate her run with Riton back in the Spotifycore heyday of 2016-2018. I’m going to give the MVP to Nigerian rapper Brazy (featured once before) whose Simon Says routine really sells it.

8. V#, Larria: Cafe Vợt

A wild V-pop recommendation from George Henderson, who just wrote a great piece on the music of Xanadu. A commenter on that post refers to The Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope” as the “High School Musical version of the New York Dolls.” Yes, please.

9. Simge: Önümüz Yaz

Another addition to the august, international roster of “Say So” clones (global espresso?), this one from Turkey. (H/t Jacob Sujin Kuppermann)

10. Girly Girl Productions: 10 Drunk Cigarettes

The TikTok chum generator offers up this bizarre novelty that I absolutely love — ostensibly an A.I. creation, which makes sense for vocals and maybe lyrics, but I don’t buy that machine learning could have had much of a hand in the pop construction. It’s like if the Big Bad from Portal joined forces with Ark Music Factory to go viral on TikTok as stage 1 of a hazy world domination scheme.

11. Toby Romeo, RaffaFL, Cumbiafrica: Con La Luna

The extremely dumb hits keep coming — here’s “The Ketchup Song” smushed into a Global Bassment style of EDM.

12. Valentino Khan: Brazillionaire

Let’s end this section with maybe the dumbest of the lot — or at least dumb of me to include it instead of literally any random song I heard from Brazil this week. But I’ll leave good enough alone — born sellout DJ Valentino Khan sutures vocals from a Brazilian MC to an autopilot house beat.

13. Sofia Valdés, Cuco: How’s That Working Out

Panamanian singer collabs with Cuco, whose woozy bedroom-studio R&B album Para Mi impressed me in 2019.

14. DIDIxDADA: Vanilla Sky

Ha, snuck one more Thai entry in that didn’t fit in the T-pop block — breezy and bashful (“I blush and blush”).

15. FEVER 333: No Hostages

No room this week to expound on nu-metal kinda sorta coming back over the past few years, not that I have that much to say about it. But it turns out I kind of like raging against the machine again (“you might be at home when they kill you / you might be alone when they kill you”).

16. LiSA: 洗脳

My preferred LiSA (not the other one) sounding like new (as in, “shiny and”) metal after the nu-metal.

17. Molly Nilsson: The Beauty of the Day

Eclectic Swedish singer-songwriter gets a lot of mileage out of a sequencer and a diary entry.

18. N.Y.P.D. 南洋派對: 夏灣拿之夜

At first I thought this album from a Hong Kong garage group was an example of Spotify shenanigans — tons of seemingly disconnected artists in wildly different styles, from rap-metal to an old mambo record, all free riding. But it turns out that the whole thing is an A.I. concept album, taking the band’s back catalogue and creating “remixes” with A.I. to make it sound like everyone in the world (and at any given time in music history) just had to put their spin on an oeuvre that by my count totals a whopping 9 songs.

19. Slippers: Pretend World

20. Velocity Girl: Copacetic (Peel Session version) [1993]

An indie rock “before and after,” the “before” coming second (a re-released Peel session from Sub Pop group Velocity Girl). Slippers is another drop in the ocean of mid-90s alt fetishization, a trend that should be exhausting but hasn’t worn out its welcome yet, even if nearly a decade later no one has gotten close to Colleen Green’s I Don’t Want to Grow Up from 2015, the be-all end-all version of this.

21. Dept: ต้องห้ามน้ำตาแบบไหน (Lacrimal Gland)

Ha (again) — another one from Thailand! Typically gauze-lensed indie pop from Dept, a new fave. Not sure why this was tagged “T-pop girl groups” but I’m not complaining.

22. Kelvin Momo f. Stixx, Marvin & Mano: Jazz Cruise

Shakes & Les & co. have brought back immersive jazz instrumental amapiano this year, the sort of stuff that takes you back to the mythical jam session that sparked the whole movement. This one’s from Kelvin Momo, whose limpid piano style has been a part of the amapiano zeitgeist since the early days.

23. Joseph Brunelle: Highways of Your Mind [1981]

Thought this was a shameless Will Oldham rip-off until I realized it’s a Numero Group re-release from 1981. So who’s zoomin’ who?

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That’s it! Until next time, go to Thailand if you can swing it, and feel free to bring me back some CDs.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Gen1es’ “Lucky Bell”

1. Last week I promised some words on McDonald’s book, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, but I don’t have enough space for it this week, which is convenient for me because I didn’t finish reading it!