By 2025 standards, The Boyz’ excellent VVV did everything it could to buck the year’s most regrettable trends, turning its energy way up, adding a great series of catchy melodies and stretching the track to nearly four (!) minutes to accommodate multiple musical goodies (a bridge! a dance break!). No wonder it’s one of the year’s best songs. With follow-up Stylish, it’s as if the group wanted to show exactly what could have happened if they had gone the opposite route.
A precipitous plunge in quality between comebacks is rare, but it does happen. My mind immediately goes to A.C.E’s Under Cover -> Savage in 2019. Unfortunately, the VVV -> Stylish trendline mirrors this drop. I recall seeing one of The Boyz state that the main purpose of this song was for the guys to look stylish on stage, and that’s a problem. The purpose of a song should be to… be a good song. Everything else is ornamentation.
With Stylish, we get two and a half minutes of mind-numbing sing-talk over an unremarkable beat that cribs from the seemingly unlimited supply of trap-meets-gurgling-synth production K-pop can’t seem to get enough of. As usual with a track like this, the verses barely qualify as rap, moving at a sluggish pace and bearing little rhythm worth returning to. The chorus is even more inane, with the translated lyrics proudly declaring that “even gibberish is stylish” before devolving into a series of “guap guap guap,” “shot shot shot” and “bubble gum bubble gum pop” lyrical centerpieces. I swear I’m not making this up. Emergency sirens blare throughout the track, which is probably my fault because I’ve filed a police report for crimes against K-pop.
| Hooks | 5 |
| Production | 5 |
| Longevity | 5 |
| Bias | 5 |
| RATING | 5 |
