Dance-house meets voguing to infinity and beyond in LE SSERAFIM’s latest comeback: CRAZY. The titular track isn’t one to forget, with a minimal house beat, catchy but effortless verses, and a line you’ll have in your head for weeks: “Act like an angel and dress like crazy”. We sniff some slightly put-on English accents by Kazuha and Yunjin during their “girls are girling” parts, for the extra brattiness of course (à la Britney Spears on “Scream & Shout”).
Aside from lampshade-heads in an aquarium, fans of Ballroom were pleased to spot House of Juicy Couture’s dancers in the song’s official music video: a nod to the culture the girls were inspired by for this comeback. The “Vogue” and “Bounce Up” versions of the song received a lot of love as remixes, and it seems that people just can’t get enough. There was no one better to feature on a re-release, then, than the young queen of pop who’s left her imprint on the K-Pop industry already: PinkPantheress.
The rest of the EP keeps to their strict formula: spoken words in Korean, Japanese and English to a sickening beat open the album in “Chasing Lightning”, which includes gems like Yunjin’s musings about Greek yoghurt. As always, the EP has four songs and an intro, and the last three are as fun as those previously advertised.
If there was a genre called circus pop, “Pierrot” would probably be it. Trap is overlaid with clownish elements and ad-libs, and it’s quite the fun beat. Eunchae’s deep-voiced rapping we saw a bit of in “CRAZY” makes a return, and adds a more varied flavour to the girls’ sound. We’re met with an unexpected presence of blaring guitars in “1-800-hot-n-fun”; and a mean riff is as loyally stuck to as the attitude-infused hook: “I like to dance when I party / I like to kiss everybody / Where the heck is Saki? / She’s waiting down in the lobby / I’m tryna break it down, yeah, baby, get her, turn up the party”.
As usual, the gentlest song comes last, to soften the comedown from a record brimming with glitz and energy. “Crazier” is the answer to “CRAZY”; the girls, in their rawest forms, reflect on who they’ve become and the lives they sacrificed for music. It’s a bittersweet ode to all the stars like themselves who’ve achieved fame and success, but lost the ability or privilege to be truly themselves while under the spotlight. They can no longer be crazier. It’s quite a beautifully written song through a less recognised lens, and the outro describes it as loving what they do beyond sanity. We’d have to agree with Chaewon’s closing lines, highlighting the sacrifices we deem worth it for the things we love. The flower certainly blooms even on a field of thorns.
CRAZY is out now. LE SSERAFIM can be found on Instagram here.