Review

Song Review: Odd Youth – Best Friendz

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Odd Youth - Best FriendzSince their establishment in 2005, Top Media has exclusively managed male acts. Teen Top, 100%, UP10TION and MCND have all made their way through the agency’s ranks, but now Top is branching out to debut their first ever girl group. Odd Youth haven’t taken that all-important debut step yet, but we get a first look at them today with their “brand MV” for Best Friendz.

That “z” at the end of “friendz” is already rubbing me the wrong way, but I’m going to do my best to overlook it and focus on the music! Can Odd Youth live up to their name and finally inject some new ideas into K-pop’s staid girl group landscape?

The answer is… not really. Best Friendz is a cute Kidz Bop, bounding along bright percussion that encourages the chirpiest of singing. Nearly every note bends upward in a cupie doll style, which will either charm or repel listeners depending on their tolerance for the saccharine. To me, the song sounds like something you’d hear in a Barbie cartoon (do those exist?), fusing sing-song melodies to a sunny exclamation extoling the virtues of friendship. I can’t begrudge a song for doling out (very commercialized) positivity, but this brand of grade school cheese is definitely not for me.

Hooks 7
 Production 7
 Longevity 6
 Bias 6
 RATING 6.5

Grade: D

26 thoughts on “Song Review: Odd Youth – Best Friendz”

  1. I’m all for sweet, cutesy songs, but this is almost leaning into cloying. Not my cup of tea , methinks 🥴

    Rating’s the same, and oof, a song rated in 6s for the third day in a row. Can we now hope for a better 9s-filled November now or smth?

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      • Decided that all the 9+ rated songs from Jan and June was enough and then decided to throw in bad-to-mid-to-decent-but-not-a-big-standout-enough songs so we don’t get too used to excellent music, methinks 😞

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  2. I had a rule from back when the kids were younger: I would not put the little ones in any day care that misspelled words in a cutesy way (“Kid’s Korner”), or had backward letters on their sign. “KIDZ KORNER” with a backwards R in the middle was a triple no.

    For me its not so much the music, which is a bit too sweet. It is also the lyrics. “You can be my best friend” doesn’t just skew young, it is young. I mean, maybe they are targeting the pre-teen market, but maybe they just didn’t think hard enough.

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  3. Song is meh.

    Anyway! Regarding Barbie cartoons, I highly recommend Barbie Life In The Dreamhouse! Legit one of the funniest modern animated series I’ve watched. A real shame they only produced one season’s worth of episodes.

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  4. I find this song very nostalgic reminds me of early 2010s music. I have a high tolerance for this type of singing, so I’m not bothered by it in this song. However, this better not be how they doing every song. It’s a 7.5 for me

    closest kpop song I can think of is “sixteen” by oh my girl

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  5. Aw. I really want to like this group since Guinn Myah is in it and she was one of the most talented contestants in Girls Planet 999, but this is… eh. I’m hoping their debut will be better. I know Myah fits cute concepts very well and I love those too, but I don’t think they needed to go the Kidz Bop route.

    Btw, there are Barbie cartoons. I had entire CD collections of these movies… Anyway, hearing the first few seconds, you were scaringly accurate with that comparison (although even this one has a bit more edge to it, somehow.)

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  6. I love the music video. I like how the girls are styled and are causing havoc despite just doing their thing and bopping along. All these white people hating them while they say “you can be my best friendz”. A mob of white people chasing a group of teenage Korean girls is such a sight 😭. Americans would not approve that visual. But this is Korea and we know they love having white people in their videos

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  7. This weirdly reminds me of We Are Young by Panic! At The Disco? Except the melody is way too flat. At least this song is age appropriate and they’re not singing about how they’re the baddest teens…

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  10. A quirky song. I smiled watching the MV. Probably catered to a much younger generation of Kpop fans, and that’s alright. The girls seem to sell it well. Maybe they are going for the girl version of BoysNextDoor? I’m also glad they are not singing about how bad and rich they are, or worse, using nursery rhymes samples and stuff like that. I’ll probably never listen to this song again, but if I were a preteen I would rate it an 8. Since I’m not, and I didn’t hate it, I’ll give it a 7.75🙃

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  11. Is it just me or did I have to do a double take just to make sure that I wasn’t looking at nwjns… people say that ILLIT is a copy of nwjns, but these girls straight up look so similar to them, it’s not a problem for me, but these are obviously really young girls and bunnies are known as the 4th gen blinks for a reason

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