Life Listens: New music from BabyMonster, Bjork, Linying, Nine Ze CP and Tate McRae

Chart Champ: BabyMonster – Batter Up

BabyMonster, one of the most highly anticipated K-pop debuts, are finally here.

K-pop label YG Entertainment’s first new girl group in seven years – since the massively successful quartet Blackpink – dropped their debut single Batter Up on Nov 27. The baseball-themed hip-hop track topped iTunes’ song chart in 14 countries within a day of its release and is the first K-pop debut in 2023 to chart within the United States’ iTunes Top 50.

The music video is also the No. 1 trending video in the music category on YouTube. It garnered more than 28 million views in a day.

The sextet, aged 14 to 21, comprise South Korean members Rora and Rami, Thai members Pharita and Chiquita, and Japanese members Ruka and Asa. The group originally planned to debut with seven members, but YG announced on Nov 15 that South Korean trainee Ahyeon had left the line-up due to health issues.

While Batter Up is an indisputable chart champ, the song itself is underwhelming. Everything from the braggadocio lyrics to the familiar synthesised brass melodies is tired, formulaic and derivative of better material from earlier YG girl groups such as 2NE1 and Blackpink.

Must-see MV: Bjork featuring Rosalia – Oral

A team-up between Icelandic singer-songwriter Bjork and Spanish pop star Rosalia was surely not on anyone’s bingo card for 2023. But the pair do make for a sonically and visually arresting combination in Oral, a charity single to raise money for, and awareness of, open-pen fish farming in Iceland. 

Oral, written by Bjork in the late 1990s but shelved until now, features orchestral strings and an earworm of a chorus with the lyrics: “Is that the right thing to do? Oh, I just don’t know. I just don’t know.”

The celestial voice of 58-year-old Bjork is easily recognisable, but 31-year-old Rosalia’s cooler, crisper tone holds its own, harmonising well during the reverberating choruses and ringing clear during solo parts.

The music video is worth a watch; it is unexpectedly weird and offbeat in a way that only Bjork can pull off. 

It features artificial intelligence-generated “avatars” – or deepfakes – of the two artistes sparring in a backlit white room.

There is an uncanny quality to their appearances in the video, with Bjork seemingly generated to look how she did 20 years ago.  

It ends with the duo attacking the “camera” and sending it to the ground in what seems to be a self-aware commentary on the rapid and seemingly harmful proliferation of generative AI in our lives.

Ace Album: Nine Ze CP – Love Game

Mandopop duo Nine Ze CP, who were formed three years ago, are back with their second album Love Game.

The group consist of Taiwanese singer Nine Chen and Singaporean singer Feng Ze, long-time friends who have appeared in vlogs and variety shows together.

Opening track Steal Your Love is a boppy disco-pop number which depicts how a partner’s influence helps one become a better person, while second track Love Game is a rock song about being with a loved one through the storms of life.

So far, the album’s most well-received track is the aching ballad Don’t Leave Me, which has been played more than 800,000 times on Spotify. It tells the story of a guilt-ridden man who regrets how he has treated his lover and is begging her not to leave. Both singers set aside their machismo here and milk the anguish to great effect.

When love is envisioned as a game, the result is usually either a “game on” or “game over”. But Nine Ze CP’s new work goes a long way to flesh out the intricacies of such relationships.

Stream This Song: Tate McRae – Exes

Canadian singer and dancer Tate McRae is part of a new generation of emerging female music talent led by American pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo. In fact, the 20-year-olds are friends, with McRae recently appearing in Rodrigo’s Bad Idea Right? music video.

McRae has garnered a small but growing fanbase with her raspy voice and an intimate genre of pop that straddles between alternative and electronic, as heard in previous songs such as You Broke Me First and Greedy.

Her latest release, Exes, has her singing about turning her back on flaky love interests while reflecting on being an unreliable girlfriend. 

The track – which is from Think Later, her sophomore album that will be out on Dec 8 – was produced and co-written by Ryan Tedder, the frontman of American pop band OneRepublic. He has also created hits for many big names such as Adele and Beyonce.

Though not lyrically or musically ground-breaking, Exes is catchy and snappy in all the right ways, with McRae’s sleepy voice a perfect match for the apathetic lyrics and four-chord progression ubiquitous in today’s pop music. 

Singapore Scene: Linying – House Mouse

If Singaporean singer-songwriter Linying’s new EP has an ethereal, otherworldly quality, it is probably because she recorded it in a Los Angeles studio that she describes as “a haunted mansion full of every instrument you could ever imagine”.

House Mouse is her most organic-sounding release to date, a collection of dream-pop tunes that relies less on electronic production found in her previous works and more on instruments that include the erhu, tack piano and EBow. 

The Los Angeles-based artiste, best known in Singapore for singing and co-writing the 2021 National Day Parade theme song The Road Ahead, seems like she is in a sanguine mood. 

Happiness, for example, is a euphoric track where she posits that the end of a relationship can be a cause for celebration, a time to savour the newfound freedom of singlehood. 

The EP also includes previously released singles Porcupine and Take Me To Your House, two engaging power-pop tunes with grungy undertones.