The soft, easy-listening trend in K-pop isn’t unique to girl groups. Every once and awhile, a boy group also jumps onto the bandwagon, muting their sound palette for an atmospheric shuffle. Such is the case with N.TOP’s new single Silhouette (실루엣). This group debuted last year and has been semi active in both Korea and Japan. I had to check back to see if I’d written about them before and it looks like they’ve only had a brief mention in a J-pop round-up post.

Silhouette is unlikely to inspire much more attention. While the instrumental presents a few nice synth textures, the track itself is like musical wallpaper. It tends to fade into the background as you listen, too timid to pull its shoulders back and actually say something. Instead, we get a bunch of soft “doo doo doos” as the production wafts behind the guys’ vocals. Like Heart Of Woman’s pre-release yesterday, this feels like a song that’s already tied to an earlier generation of K-pop. I want to believe we’re moving onto more exciting things. On the plus side, one of their album tracks sounded super promising in an earlier highlight medley.

Grade: C-