Gift Category: Share Music With Me
My Top 5 SHINee Songs
SHINee is my favorite kpop group! They've been a working group for 16 years, from a soft-baby-faced boy band to now adults in their thirties with a range of musical and media talents, they still have a distinct sound and taste that I can count on to deliver my 'album of the year' every time. Their most recent studio album, HARD (2023), is a no-skip masterpiece, and it was very hard picking just one song off of it for my top five.
1. Area (on Atlantis)
Easily my favorite kpop song of all time by my favorite K-pop group. It's a b-side on the ATLANTIS album, about the space left empty by someone who is gone. It features all of SHINee's masterful falsettos and tight, warm harmonies, with a nod to their missing member Jonghyun and the area that can never be filled without him. It's sooooo beautiful.
2. Satellite (on HARD)
Satellite is another gentle, extremely harmonic tune, but a little more dimensional and with a peppier arrangement then the more somber "Area." It's a little jazzy, hopeful, emerging, dramatic, and jovially about someone being so out of your league you can only circle them "like a satellite." So it's a little wistful, but maybe also a little hopeful, and you can't argue with that great, crunchy guitar riff that swings back and forth under the soaring chorus. It's a great composition!
3. 1 of 1 (on 1 and 1)
Listen here on Youtube music or watch the music video on youtube here or embedded below:
1 of 1 is the song that introduced me to SHINee, though it would be a couple years before I really "got into" them. I remember a friend showing me the music video and explaining to me that one member (Onew, the eldest and group leader) was sitting the whole time and not dancing because he broke his ankle, and I found this to be an extremely funny fact. It's all I can think about when I watch it. BUT anyway, you know by now I love a 90s/aughts throwback, and this sounds SO fun. Their costumes are extremely fun, and the women's stylings look exactly like I remember middle school fashion looking like. This is a great, fully realized concept and a super fun, catchy song. It'll always have a place in my heart!
4. Evil (on Misconceptions of Us)
Probably a strange choice, but sometime later, the friend who introducted me to SHINee via "1 of 1" streamed a SHINee concert DVD for her birthday and when this song came on I was like "what is this???I love it???" and added it to my newly blooming Kpop song rotation. It's just very catchy, again very harmonic, and really driving. Call this my more inexplicable fave, but I'm not tired of it.
5. Ring Ding Dong (on 2009, Year of Us [EP]))
Listen here on Youtube music or watch the music video on youtube here or embedded below:
RING DING DONG RING DING DONG RING DINNGGY DING DINGGY DING DING DING
Just kidding. Hey, if you knew about SHINee without necessarily being a fan of SHINee, it was probably because of this song, which is...such a product of a time. It looks like an aughts fanfiction, with angel and devil wings and mirrors and terrible haircuts. It's known as "the banned test song," because it was believed to make students do poorly on tests because it was so catchy it would get stuck in their heads. It's legendary. It's silly. But also? I think it's GOOD. You can fight me on that. But I genuinely enjoy listening to it! Have some fun!!!