Riding off the success of LNGSHOT’s debut, agency founder Jay Park is injecting even more credibility to the group by collaborating with them on an album release. I wasn’t too impressed with last week’s teaser 4SHO 4SHO, but understood the point of that exercise. LNGSHOT are building a fanbase at the fringes of mainstream K-pop, attempting to blend the idol and hip-hop worlds together. So far, they’ve been more successful than most would have predicted.

There’s a style of K-hip-hop that really appeals to me, but most of those songs were released in the early-to-mid 2010s before trap and rage and monotonous flows became popular. Today, most hip-hop releases in this vein bore me to death. They’re somehow both noisy/obnoxious and dull/repetitive. I enjoy some boisterous disruption, but not if you’re simply chanting the same predictable lines over and over. Yeah! Yeah! has about two melodic/rhythmic ideas and uses them up within the space of a minute. An extended verse before the final chorus injects much-needed structural variety, but by this time my eyes have already glazed over. The percussion is tinny and shrill, the vocal effects are incessant and the posturing is exhausting.

Grade: D+