i don't know how to start. so i'm starting with saying that. actually a disclaimer is a good idea since kpop is such an inflammatory topic. disclaimer: if you're familiar with me, you should know i have strong opinions and like to be critical about the things i like. i will continue to be like that even if i like enhypen a lot. oh i should also introduce what this is about to be...
it's my review of enhypen's knew album knife "the sin:vanish"! maybe not a review? maybe more like "my thoughts on" because review sounds too formal to me and i don't like to do things that read as too formal or organised. and i don't like labels too much either. and i'm going to be talking about more than their album.
firstly i didn't even want them to release a new album. which reminds me of another disclaimer: i might seem hypocritical. i think in some ways i probs just am. i criticise things and then try to enjoy them anyways. i think it's not possible to get around this if you want to enjoy your life but don't want to keep your head in the sand, and the most hypocritical thing you can do in this world in my mind is be a kpop fan, which i will get into. to get back on track: i didn't want them to come back so soon. i'm enjoying it a lot anyways, but i don't think kpop groups should release as much as they do. enhypen has only just finished wrapping up their tour. txt is coming back soon too??? they released a japanese album and yeonjun released his solo in the final months of 2025????? i think the rate at which kpop groups release music is terrible for two major reasons. we move on from things so quickly; idols are so overworked. i'm positive it's bad for every kpop group but it genuinely feels like enhypen is incessantly active. the volume of things they release disturbs me. they release things like they have 48 hrs in their day but seem exhausted in a way to me that proves they have 24 like everyone else. maybe even 12. where they find time to make content for the mobile game--which, imo, should only have been images of the cute little characters and not pngs of the members themselves, possibly the first of this post's series of unpopular opinions, but nobody cares about what i want which is why enhypen had a comeback in the first place--is a genuine mystery to me. alongside everything else they do??? i'm sure filming a short tiktok isn't particularly time consuming or strenuous, but why so many of them? i think constant streams of content are one of the worst things to come from the invention of smartphones. content in general. i hate content. i think there should be less of everything. i think what we do get should be slower and more intentional. i think people should want less. i think things should be created with depth in mind rather than expansion. what's the point of many cheap productions over one really luxurious one? sit with an old album. if you run out of music, find something else. i say all this as somebody who deeply enjoys the parasocial aspects of kpop. i overplayed enhypen's music last year and was looking forward to more, even if i think they should take a year-long break. i was starting to miss the strangers i can only "interact" with through my phone. i hate how much enjoying kpop requires looking at a screen.
of course i say all of this knowing why it's like this. breaks aren't profitable. constant updates that make customers think they really know that idol as a person are. none of what i'm saying is new. what does it have to do with the sin: vanish? i mean i'm saying all of this but i'm enjoying promotion season a lot. the promotion of the album has been so awesome. it also relied on constant updates, but i think that tracks for the format being a news website. i like the news site a lot. it's really cool, and i love things that are different/try to be different. it's a genuine shame it's teeming with gen ai but that isn't the conversation i'm trying to have here, just something i'm acknowleding because it's important to know. i think what the news website did, aside from being just a really creative and interactive mode of promotion, was create a really textured world for this comeback. it provided a solid context for what we were going to see. i like how the particular angle was making vampirism a mundane aspect of life. daily updates with articles on topics you'd read on a human site, down to recent trends like running clubs, which i found funny. vampirism was a more visible phenomenon than usual, and with a satirical spin. vampires who try to overcome garlic "allergies" or have their fangs atrophy from lack of use. a good dose of satire is a good approach to vampires i think, because unfortunately it's the kind of trope that can be ham-fisted very easily, cheap jabs at emotion via immortality and whatever, not to mention there's no shortage of vampire media; but i think enhypen does a good job of keeping their vampire concept refreshing. there's a well-managed and wide range of aesthetics and ideas. the bite me and bad desire eras are so serious and romantic, but then you have brought the heat back which is just such a strange, almost wacky video. personally i think it's my best kpop video of all time but i know that sort of claim will have people fantasise about hurting me. even so it's still my truth... one of the main reasons i like kpop is because it's just so weird and honestly silly. it's what makes it good. kpop is so good at taking a very simple thing and stretching it in all sorts of quirky and arbitrary directions, which i think is its charm. like how does getting hit by a fruit truck become a visual concept? let alone for vampires?? like are you kidding me.
i like mundane vampires/modernity-meets-vampirisms a lot. i loveeee only lovers left alive. (sarita pointed out that's likely where they got the blood popsicles from btw. i wouldn't be surprised. the movie is mentioned on the website actually, on their movies for christmas recommendations list.) the mundanity is precarious--vampires are still only on the cusp of acceptance. so i liked how they built this precarious world up and teased, quite literally with the teasers, that it was all going to come down: enha is on the run because they broke the ultimate taboo. also having it come crashing down visually by flooding the news website with articles on their escape and the cultural aftermath as the teasers happen in real time...! that's so fun!! the comeback is literally a part of the story, like the music videos and songs that we get are situated into a larger piece; are what the "characters" are getting up to in real time, thte mv as the narrative's culmination. it's not a one-off or self-contained thing. we're not just watching their glamour shots on youtube, they're performing them for an in-world news audience. i just love media that's more of an experience so much, or is experienced both by a real live audience as well as takes place in its fictional world, like whatever that creation of multiple layers of participation is. the ludonarrative or whatever (because i love when video games achieve that sort of thing). so i'm so excited i got to be a part of enhypen's comeback period this time. it's so fun to be able to guess what they're getting up to next! they want you to theorise and guess and participate! they posted their little instagram reels with spoilers for the tracklist for you to guess! guess!!!
but you don't actually have to guess because people go and have ai uncover the blurred image of the tracklist and spoil it for everybody???? remember what i was saying about how people should want less content. about how we should slow down? i think one of the worst things about how we engage with our hobbies now is this constant content generation that leads us to such impatience. everyone is so used to immediate stimulation and reward that we just can't wait for the songs to come out, we have to have it all now... we have to be the first to know this thing and show off that we know this thing. i was so sad this happened because it spoiled for me an aspect of the album i really would have enjoyed had i gotten to encounter it myself when the album actually dropped. all those tracks puffing up the album to eleven songs...the narrations........... like i love album skits and narrations. i love roleplay! i love voice acting audios and scenarios! i was actually so devastated to learn this because i'm so impressed they did it, like went full send on the story. i think that kind of decision is really cool because it requires more effort to understand, as opposed to being songs that anyone can listen to. like to understand the full treat you have to understand enhypen's concept and at least the narrative of this comeback, and that kind of barrier to entry is a risk that i don't think kpop companies, let alone hybe-related ones, are usually willing to take considering how readily they prefer to hop on trends at the constant expense of the richer, more esoteric things they put out. if they think that's what will finally put them on the western side of the map they will sell out what they've previously made. and on that note.
when the first teaser came out i was initially so disappointed. it was the first thing they'd put out, before all of the website stuff. i'm about to say something else that would be punishing had this been on twitter, but it reminded me so much of txt's beautiful strangers mv my heart actually started sinking. i love txt. i think their concept is one of the most beautiful things i have ever experienced and that feeling has yet to flicker even a little. my thoughts on it will require a later post if i'm even able to get the words out, so overcome am i with inspiration and emotion whenever i revisit it. and that's why i found beautiful strangers disappointing. i think song of the stars is so beautiful and meaningful and one of the best things they've ever released. i think beautiful strangers suffers from hybe's aforementioned readiness to forsake obscurity in place of ubiquitous aesthetics they think will appeal to an unspecified, vague audience--that is, whoever manages to come across and then click on the video. i've seen analyses of the video that grants it more meaning and i'm satisfied at times, but ultimately i don't think it's really doing anything that makes it stand out. ubiquitous is really the best way i can describe it. also it uses this one visual thing i noticed in aespa's dirty work... all those masked extras??? outside by enhypen has them too. where do these random visual trends even start?? all i know is that they piss me off. like sure you can extrapolate meaning from them or kind of fudge meanings into them to match the meanings that already exist within txt's overarching story, let's say, but why do that when you can just go at the production with the meanings in mind in the first place??? i feel like i'm being made fun of when i see the same aesthetics repeatedly in a bid for my attention when their existence alone holds no meaning. so however it is the first sin:vanish teaser was constructed really made me think i was about to get a rehashed beautiful strangers; the same generic apocalyptic feel and lack of a tangible purpose. i also thought the black outfits were similar to txt's outfits for the awake version of their album the star chapter: together, and also the european summer w/e aesthetics were just txt's love language, which i was not a huge fan of either. i'm not saying any of this because in an attempt to belitlte either group, especially considering txt and enhypen are my favourite groups and are essentially in the same company as far as i really care, which i don't. i just think these similarities are true. i do not put any of this behaviour past any kpop company and definitely not be:lift (and hybe) who plagiarises for sport. but i'm happy because my fear was short-lived. as the rest of the teasers came out it was clear that in a lot of ways enhypen was doing their own thing, which means that they were doing something that wasn't just meant to be popular visual cues; they were doing something that had purpose behind it. ultimately i just really appreciate when things have meaning, and if not meaning then uniqueness. enhypen actually has yet to really let me down where eithr of those things are concerned. they are very good at having videos with purposes to them, scenes that aren't just glamour shots but are actions in the worlds they're in, inhabiting the scene instead of just being pasted over it. and they're good at keeping their videos weird or at least weird enough for my tastes. they're trekking through the desert but jungwon gets a dreamy little sparkle effect. sunoo arm wrestles three guys at once. they get hit by a fruit truck. same weird self-satirical vampires. putting a coin down after stealing water. checking themselves out before getting dragged away. stealing a giant red orb. can you tell i really love stealer... wait i'm just realising it's called stealer because they're stealing the giant red orb. what the fuck.
i think that's all i really had to say on that... i'd more or less just start repeating myself trying to perfectly word how much i like whatever weird quality enhypen adds to their videos. i need to just study them one day. i also really liked those weird interludes each teaser came with, i like somewhat nonsensical things like that. (i might rewatch them to have more to say later.) ok i think i can move onto their sound now. it's easier for me to formulate my opinions on enhypen at times by comparing them to txt and vice versa (it's how i got into enhypen in the first place) so i'm about to bring up txt again sorry. something i think about while listening to enhypen's music from time to time is that i'm not really sure what their sound is. i think txt has a very stable identity where their music is concerned, even when they hop around genres as kpop groups are wont to do. i don't know enough about music or music production to say why that is. i know a song is an enhypen song because it's enhypen singing it, but i think i could hear a song not sung by txt and if it had certain qualities to it i could think "this is like a txt song". i really don't know what about their respective productions makes that the case, but i guess there must be some kind of stronger sense of unity amongst txt's discography than enhypen's, at least to me. i don't even mean that to say that i think txt has better music because i love both of their music. it's more that when i first heard no way back from the teaser i thought to myself that i was finally starting to feel like i understood the kind of music enhypen makes. it's funny because it ended up being a b-side??? maybe it's just too on the nose where the narrative is concerned. when they could be releasing something a little more off to the side and kitschy like KNIFE.
knife! knife! knife! (it's a) knife! knife! knife! knife! (it's a) knife! fashion! fashion! fashion! fashion! i mean FEIN. FEIN. FEIN. FEIN.
i'm not saying anything knew here either. i mean if anything i'm just wondering what the obsession with fein is in particular. but hybe is pretty monkey see monkey do and then so is be:lift so i guess it's more like a string of events. i don't know. i wish i knew how it is a company decides when they're going to be "influenced" by what for their next work or what those internal discussions looked like. i love knife by the way. i think the phrase is perfect. i almost want to delete the cortis and travis scott lines because i just want to say it's a knife on it's own. knife! knife! knife! it's a knife! i LOVE these instagram posts for it. i really love the 2000s. i love abstracting a mundane object into a concept. i love the pseudo-complexity granted by turing tests, like i even said this back in my donut peach post. the ability to see multiple depictions of something and know it's still just that one thing. i mean granted all of the images in that turing test are knives, but the simplicity of that i know is the point. it's a knife. let's keep saying it. it's a knife. it's not anything else. it's a knife. that's going to frustrate me. i know it has no deeper meaning. it's just meant to be an effective catchy phrase.