Dal Shabet Save K-Pop With "Someone Like U"

K-pop's been in a sorry state recently: after a December stuffed with horrid winter-themed songs and snoozefest ballads, Dal Shabet, clearly horrified by the absolute slop that's sitting atop of Melon currently, have dropped the best song of 2016 five days into the year. Bless their hearts.

Dal Shabet are hardly strangers to retro-themed songs, but with "Someone Like U" Brave Brothers, realising that he perfected the "Miniskirt" formula with version 3.0, turns the '80s vibes up to eleven to deliver one of the strongest retro songs K-pop has seen, as well as the strongest track in Dal Shabet's discography (yes, I'm including the phenomenal "B.B.B" here as well).

The queens return. All hail.

"Someone Like U" succeeds mainly through its exceptional pacing: it's just as busy as one would expect from a Brave Brothers track, barraging the listener with laser synths, brass motifs, and multi-tracked vocals at a relentless pace, yet it never feels exhausting to listen to. The members should all be credited as well for their brilliant delivery; each of them provides enough lift to uphold the song's energy, especially Serri who does an unexpectedly great job in the rap section, firing off the lyrics with a surprising amount of sass.

The real Baddest Female

It's this energy that also makes the song so Dal Shabet in style - I loved both "B.B.B" and "Joker" and thought both were successful in showing a more "mature" image for the group, though both just felt slightly awkward in that the members lacked the assertiveness to convey much confidence, and both unfortunately succeeded more due to the instrumentals than the performers. Here though, backed with the vigour of their older singles but without the cloying sweetness, they seem much more certain, much more like themselves (though it's a shame that the lyrics aren't about taking a big dick this time).

"Eight inches? Honey don't make me laugh"

The video is standard Dal Shabet fare as the girls realise a boy's cheating with all four of them, and so they set out to get revenge by training at a gym before firing glitter and confetti out of big guns right at his face in the middle of a club. Subtlety has always been their strong point. Of course, the main thing is that the visuals are flawless, and how couldn't they be when you have Woohee in your group STEP ON ME WOOHEE?

"They're all in the middle in terms of everything~~~"- a blind netizen

It's incredibly difficult to come up with any kind of real criticism with this song because it gets everything right: it's lighthearted, it's fun, the members do a fantastic job at carrying it, and overall it really does feel like Dal Shabet's most confident release so far. "Someone Like U" has set the bar for 2016 so high that I'm not sure if any groups will even match it in quality, let alone surpass it (one thing's for sure though: WINNER definitely won't).