Track Spotlight – S&S (ARrC)

By deforestedmusic on 12 Oct 2025

Genre-bending or mind-bending? Radical or moderate? Something other than binary?

Let's see what we have here!

Author's Note: This was originally written in August 20, 2024.

Prelude

Claude Debussy once said, "Works of art make rules, rules do not make works of art." That is what emerged from the confines of a series of A&R meetings that eventually made NCT. Of course, SM Entertainment back in 2014 had revolutionized pop (SHINee), and dance/electronic (f(x)). They were beginning to make inroads in jazz fusion, Latin, and most notably contemporary Hip-Hop/Rap with EXO. Yes, EXO was the hypothesis to what would eventually constitute as NCT. They were the most capable and musically nearest to perform anything remotely close to Hip-Hop -- they did try so in Wolf, Two Moons (with Key), El Dorado, and others.

NCT's infamous neo-sound (well that is what I call it anyway) was ultimately a foundation of what SM thought would be genre-bending for Hip-Hop itself back in 2015 at least. Let us be clear that NCT's sound back then was very different, I would call it as "Orthodox NCT" utilizing heavy usage of gang vocals, 808 beats, maximalist R&B instrumentation, and melodies (moderate) but at times minimalist dancehall, trap, liminal and space (radical). Melodies of Orthodox NCT were the basis of hits like Limitless (what I consider to be the peak orthodox NCT sound), Whiplash (this highlighted the minimalist trap-heavy faction of the Orthodox NCT), and Wake Up. There are of course many more characterizations of this orthodox iteration of neosound which Min Hee-jin (yes that's the elephant in the room) ultimately shaped contemporary (2020-present) hip-hop boy group aesthetic.

When we came into the accelerative phase of K-pop (2018-2019), NCT leaned into their radical stream of Orthodox NCT rather than prioritize melody as a backbone, and as I would see it, SM decided to invest breaking the bounds of what can be considered as an "anthem cheer" moreso a song. This is really where the rule-breaking conventions of NCT permeate into the rather hardstyle-or-innocent binary divide-based K-pop industry that was "common sense" for corporations. Of course it proved successful with Regular, Simon Says, Chain, and etc. NCT Dream on the other hand stayed with the orthodox approach and not really deviating much from traditional SM songwriting conventions on "melody and vocals first."

By the tail end of 2019 to early 2020, I saw witness to a rising trend of playful hip-hop and early copycats of the contemporary neosound. So what I call as neosound is technically the commodified radical-stream of the Orthodox NCT sound, making it as the primary sound of which NCT (since Kick It) made its stamping sound in the industry. So how did this became such a trend? Well EXO-SC, SuperM, and EXO actually accelerated the sound to be a staple of "doing" dark music -- the 3 artists followed the intuitions and findings that SM's A&R has learned of radical Orthodox NCT and released What a life (the playful hip-hop sound that 1THE9, 1TEAM were doing and indie R&B acts), Jopping (its impact on normalizing chants while doing "neo-SMP"), and Obsession (Dem Joints being the definitive producer of neosound) which I consider to be accelerative elements leading up to neosound being an omnipresent sound and is usually a strategy SM does to influence the industry.

(Note: Orthodox NCT wasn't really commodified since it was distinct from SM and an innovation of SMP although all styles in K-pop as in late-stage capitalist music industries are considered commodifications of art)

While there are merits to the neosound which ultimately pushed Hip-Hop to the forefront of K-Pop sound and also accelerated Korean idol music acceptance in the West. It unfortunately overshadowed individuality and created a compounding effect of alienation especially to traditionalist minded Korean idol listeners and to South Korea itself. Basically, the neosound alienated the core Korean pop base. Commodification usually results in alienation (Marx), the pressure to conform to the expectations of the broader music industry often leads to a homogenization of sound and style. This results in a loss of creativity, as artists may feel compelled to produce music that fits a particular mold, rather than experimenting with new ideas or pushing boundaries. The distinctiveness that once characterized underground South Korean hip-hop is overshadowed by a more polished, commercially viable product.

This is why I believe neosound has failed Korean idol boy group music into transcending hip-hop. I also talked about this in my DRIPPIN review where I vehemently criticized the commodification of philosophy in the Korean music scene and how pretentiousness is on an axiom than "human feelings."

Post-neosound (?)

On "The Response to Crisis" in Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications.

This is a bold statement to make. ARrC's sonic manifestations in Dummy and S&S actually transcend the neosound -- I would contend it is post-neosound. "Post-" here means a rearticulation, reconstruction of the neosound and it is also the era after the neosound in contemporary Korean idol boy group hip-hop-style. Our objective in this review is to specifically dissect how new fundamentals are evident in S&S, and how it changes hip-hop's most elementary theoretical generalizations (from even before neosound).

What is so interesting about this approach I am making is that Benjamin 55 (a writer of this song) worked with moving NCT Dream to the neosound with Glitch Mode. Another writer, Young Chance also worked a lot with NCT 127 especially Fact Check, and Smoothie. Although the combination of Full8loom and gxxdkelvin balances and reorients the melody, composition and structure of the song. Anyway, anyone can evidently dismiss my defense of S&S as radical, revolutionary, and transcendent because a writer of Smoothie is here and that is evidently the most regressive songs we have heard in a while. Although, usually writing for Mystic Story is different from the usual SM corporate song camps -- it is rather more "guided" by the CEO and A&R. With that out of the way, I believe we can have more contextualizations as to how this song was formulated and what is in it that makes me so invested.

S&S starts itself with an instrumentation that is rarely heard in Korean idol music at all. A modified drum beat pattern followed by a "metallic" wob sine bass that sits entirely in the midrange of the track and uses the liminal space the arrangement gives it to emphasize itself while convieniently cutting sound in the last part in an attempt to illuminate the jigsaw-ness of the "metallic" wob sine bass and vocals. It is like we are disassembling blocks. After that we enter a sort of call and response delivery, I really do not know who is supposed to be their subjects but that doesn't really matter anyway. On 0:38, We enter a new section which serves as a pre-chorus incorporating a lo-fi drum and bass R&B instrumentation while the topline literally a call to the 90s -- after 10 seconds, we use a neosound staple on the vocal line which is sing-talk chant and top it with an SM style transition to the chorus.

The chorus is very jarring on first listen as it uses digital editing on ARrC's vocalist to autotune the topline to an ambulance siren and the delivery of that is also on the sing-talk chant front (which is evidently NCT) - anyone would confuse this chorus with a new NCT release but there is enough differentiation and a post-chorus to dissociate itself from its anterior. On 1:33, a new section begins starting with a whimsical kid theatre instrumentation with heavily edited electric guitars and then introduces the "metallic" wob sine bass a few iterations after with the added e-guitars -- the rapline in this section is evidently stylistically authentic. On 1:52 the pre-chorus enters again but with trap-infused instrumentation now aside from lofi drum and bass. This section bleeds into the sing-talk chant which subverts to an anti-drop and makes the transition to the chorus compounding of anti-drops. The chorus ends earlier this time around. On 2:33 the bridge appears and it seems to be reliant to soft pianos and soft pads while adding lofi drum and bass to it, and the vocals are soft as well.

The bridge ends with a high note compounding a vocoder with techno elements surrounding the track and in a way enters an outro which is very melodic and ends with a sing-talk chant that abruptly gets interrupted by the "metallic" wob sine bass with a response from the sing-talk chant and ends on the last amplitude of the sine.

This song works because of how melodical it is, it somehow finds a thread to connect extreme elements together. This song is unserious and the production is definitely the ultimate amalgamation of contemporary hip-hop and pop in South Korea. The new fundamentals emergent in S&S is its use of melodic contingency, which is responsive and not reactionary. In post-neosound, melody becomes a reflexive agent, adapting to structural shifts and sonic interruptions. The "metallic wob sine bass" acts as the gravitational pull of the composition, while the melody orbits around it — colliding, diverging, and occasionally dissolving. This tension between form and disassembly defines the song's aesthetic grammar. Unlike neosound, which prized intensity through maximalist layering and vocal aggression, S&S finds intensity in brief silences, pitch manipulations, or the deliberate exposure of a processed human voice. It is not a rebellion against neosound but a mutation of it: less about domination of sound space and more about its negotiation. The sonic jigsaw of S&S — that push-pull between rawness and polish, automation and improvisation — is what situates it firmly within post-neosound logic.

Following Kuhn's idea of paradigm reconstruction, S&S is the normal science of the post-neosound age. It acknowledges the exhaustion of neosound's radicality while refusing to regress to melodic traditionalism. Instead, it redefines coherence itself. Where neosound sought to overwhelm, S&S seeks to reorient. In that sense, S&S doesn't just transcend neosound — it renders it obsolete. If Orthodox NCT sought to make chaos coherent, S&S makes coherence chaotic, and that's precisely why it feels like the first real step toward the post-orthodox Korean idol sound.