Music Evaluate: Seventeen – Thunder

Seventeen are celebrating an enormous ten 12 months anniversary immediately. They have been well-liked proper out of the gate, however few might have predicted simply how huge they’ve turn out to be. I keep in mind staying up very late to observe the premiere of their first music video (the ebullient Adore U) ten years in the past, however I’ve grown extra distant from their music lately. New single Thunder suits strongly inside my EDM-loving wheelhouse, however misses the prospect to measure as much as their greatest work.

I’m so blissful to listen to huge membership beats again in Ok-pop. This vitality has been missed and if it takes a bunch as influential as Seventeen to totally re-popularize it, I’m grateful for his or her service. Nevertheless, songs like Thunder and aespa’s 2024 hit Whiplash are lacking a significant aspect: The place’s the melody? As somebody who listens to a ton of dance music, I do know simply how simply this style can turn out to be faceless and generic. That’s often on account of a scarcity of melodic heft. I’m a grasping listener. I need huge dancefloor vitality and an equally huge refrain.

On this regard, Thunder sputters. It doesn’t really feel like a lot of a track in any respect. As a substitute, a sequence of spoken catchphrases populate the thumping instrumental. For a monitor with such persistently excessive vitality, all the things is unusually flat. That is most blatant throughout the hook, which opts to retreat right into a minimalist, spelled-out repetition of the title accented by a whistled loop and adopted by a haphazard melodic coda that principally spins its wheels. For such a giant membership monitor, the manufacturing is oddly muzzled as nicely. The EQ of the combo feels very hesitant, as if there’s a full terabyte of information compelled to stuff itself right into a tiny 32gb flash drive. The place’s the scope and ambition? And with no track construction that permits for construct and climax, Thunder ends with out ceremony. It’s bizarre. On paper, I must be shedding my thoughts over this track. In actuality, it barely leaves an impression.

Grade: C