Review

Song Review: LE SSERAFIM x ILLIT x Katseye – Iconic By Mistake

Posted on by 26 Comments

The idea of a super group in K-pop is very exciting. Anyone remember SuperM? As far as I know, this trio of HYBE acts don’t plan to promote together past this one-off single, but the combination of LE SSERAFIM, ILLIT and Katseye has the potential to maximize a joint slay to the nth degree. However, none of these acts have released their best music recently and the title Iconic By Mistake already makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

I’m at the point where I’m going to flip a table if I must hear yet another K-pop group brag about how awesome they are — let alone three groups doing so. This subject matter has been especially prevalent in the industry’s girl groups lately, often paired with “clap backs at the haters” that are just as insufferable. True badasses don’t need to incessantly tell us how badass they are, and this constant “tell rather than show” is more obnoxious than illuminating. It’s like walking through an endless discount rack of unwanted, cheap clothes with tired neon slogans printed all over them. Making matters worse, these songs rarely have musical substance to back up the bravado. Such is the case with Iconic By Mistake.

It’s telling that, when watching the music video for this song, much of the audio is covered in explosive sound effects. It’s not easy to distinguish these sound effects from the song itself, which creates a maelstrom effect where no individual moment (including the performances) stands out. The vast majority of Iconic By Mistake is comprised of the three groups talking about how great and beautiful and fierce they are and how we’re all “haters” for… some reason? Honestly, it’s not the least bit empowering. It’s just kind of pathetic. I know (assume?) the girls didn’t compose this, so this is no judgement on their own character, but the act HYBE has forced them to play flattens them to such a degree that they might as well be reduced to one of of those stupid slogan t-shirts on that discount rack.

There’s an argument to be made that a song like this is meant to be “camp,” but as a conneissour of camp I don’t see the kind of “wink, wink” joke that would make Iconic By Mistake funny. And even if we’re supposed to have our tongues firmly in our cheeks, the music itself is not remotely fun. Artists have been clapping back at fame since the onset of fame itself, and in that pantheon of rich people complaining about their woes, this is surface-level and completely unneeded.

Hooks 5
 Production 5
 Longevity 5
 Bias 3
 RATING 4.5

Grade: F

26 thoughts on “Song Review: LE SSERAFIM x ILLIT x Katseye – Iconic By Mistake”

  1. We could combine a few bombs, Trinity, Castle Bravo, Little Boy, Fat Man, and see if they seem more radioactive than this collaboration. I think the song needed to repeat a few more times how iconic they are. Perhaps three more verses reinforcing this would solve the problem. It went right past me

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  2. And you mean to tell me that HYBE ruined NewJeans and wasted fromis’ potential for… this?

    4.5 (4, 5, 5, 4) for me. Just a piss poor attempt at hyperpop paired with your average boring “I’m so great” slop. Worse when it’s just so plodding and doesn’t even has a single “passable” moment.

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  3. No one is quicker than Nick 🤣🤣🤣

    As soon as i heard to teaser, I immediately knew that this song is going to be shhh, and I was right.

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    • I guarantee Nicks grade for HYBE is going to be my grade at school. That’s not a compliment.

      HYBE has fucked up big time this year, BTS had their worst album to date, all their GG’s releasing well, not so good music, their poor handling of the Heeseung departure, they keep dungeoning TXT, and of course the Cortis comeback wasn’t good outside Red Red.

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      • I enjoyed TXT’s album, TWS remains their most consistent group, the LE SSERAFIM album is quite good too, and I actually liked the ENHYPEN album except the title track (and the shoehorned interludes), but this is definitely their worst year music-wise (and I predict it’s about to get worse). it’s sad because they used to care about the quality, but the gradual release over the years of TikTok slop after another, then after the huge success with Gnarly, they just stuck with that.

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  8. Ehh, I kinda like that they are clapping back at haters, I’m really sick of all the girl group hate I see all the time so this is kinda nice to me. These girls don’t deserve the hate they get so this song is their f u to haters😌

    8/10

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  9. i used my own time and free will to watch and listen to this so I guess it’s on me. It’s not the worst song I’ve ever heard but setting themselves up to even remotely claim to be iconic, on purpose or mistake.

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  12. The music video’s graphics and colors hurt my eyes, the music hurts my ears, the company behind it hurts my soul, is there anything that’s not doing damage here?

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  13. I lowkey think these songs released by hybe ggs are kinda like agenda setting, once you start talking about it, you already be seen as haters.

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  17. It’s throughly mid at hest (I’ve been more of a fan of the hyperpop stuff hybe has shoveled than most so a bare bones Drama lite is not my cup of tea and feels like a throwback to the side of 4th gen I really don’t care for) but honestly i do think the lyrics save it a bit. It’s creative and specific enough to not be just another generic f the haters song. A lot of those songs don’t work because it comes across as filler bars but in this song a lot of the lines really do grasp the mind of the strange weirdos on social media who end up going so far that it ends up benefiting the target by accident. It’s not subtle at all but then again people were too stupid (or pretending to be too stupid so they could get Elon bucks or didn’t want to get because the lyrics fit them whichever one works) to get the basic metaphor behind Spaghetti so you get this. And you know if any set of girls can speak to how bad social media can get it is ILLIT, LE SSERAFIM and Katseye.

    Also I came into this with very low expectations given that company collabs have always been crap as a baseline and the last one I remember was the truly incomprehensibly bad JYP collab so I guess anything better than that

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  19. I’m glad the groups were able to respond to some of the hate they’ve been getting (if they were involved in the lyrics in anyways, more power to them) but it’s hard to look past the Hybe capitalizing on that same hate, I could just hear the board meeting. MV wasn’t even fun to watch, feels uninspired. Instead of bring the groups’ style together, it just feels like they were flatten for this but I guess that was already happen to some extent.

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  21. .. it’s a fine song for the message it’s trying to accomplish and im totally sure the people they’re talking about is gonna take it well but is it a god awful song to listen to as well lmfao

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  22. Ah yes, solving the problem of your girl group idols getting cyberbullied relentlessly by parasocial creeps by creating a song with 0 substance and shoddy production which will only fuel the fires stoked against them (wrongfully by the way because its producers and management continually screwing them over these days).

    Add that HYBE recently chose to debut a 16 year old who was not ready to debut let alone with a concept being portrayed by, minus her, ALL ADULTS, yeah HYBE absolutely cares about the women they work with.

    3.5 (3,5,5,1). Just legally crush your enemies like any other big company.

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