I’ve been a part of the K-Pop community for six years now and I don’t think I’m alone — nor am I the first — when I say a lot has changed in the past few years.
Around the time BTS’ enlistment was announced, I slowly started pulling away from K-Pop, especially in 2025. I still kept up with new debuts and listened to songs regularly, but I stopped really investing myself into groups the way I used to. Part of it was burnout from fandom toxicity (which Koreaboo lovingly made sure I stayed updated on at all times — definitely the best place to find THE most authentic news ever, I’m sure 😃), but honestly, a bigger reason was that K-Pop just stopped feeling exciting to me.
This is where Seventeen comes in.
I had listened to their music casually for a while — mostly songs released after 2020. I knew about their choreographies and recognized some of the members, but that was pretty much it. Recently, I was rewatching HYBE Game Caterers and Seventeen kept cracking me up, and long story short, I somehow fell straight into an all-things-Seventeen rabbit hole — both music and content-wise.
To be honest, I think I’d really been missing third gen vibes, and Seventeen was one of those groups I had unfortunately never taken the time to properly get into before.
And truthfully? Rediscovering them felt like a breath of fresh air, like I was 14 again and everything was new and exciting.
I know this is probably a never-ending discussion, but third gen K-Pop just hits differently. Maybe it’s nostalgia talking, but with a lot of newer groups, especially 5th gen, it feels like there’s such a heavy focus on overproduced, TikTok-friendly music — a trend that’ll probably die out without leaving much of a mark. Obviously not every group is like this, and 4th gen feels less guilty of it than 5th gen, but a lot of songs coming out nowadays stop feeling memorable after a while.
A lot of idols also feel more robotic now too. Granted, that’s probably because of fanwars, online scrutiny, and the pressure idols are under nowadays, but sometimes it feels like individuality is disappearing because everyone’s trying to follow the same trends to fit in or make it big globally instead of standing out from each other.
Do you think newer generations will eventually develop stronger musical identities, or is trend-chasing just where K-Pop is headed now? Does anyone else feel disconnected from newer K-Pop lately? Or maybe I’ve just become one of those “back in my day” K-Pop fans 😭
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