As mentioned in my last song review, I am going to do a bit of time travelling to last week (and the past few weeks) over the weekend to review some releases which I should have reviewed, but they just managed to slip by me due to my poor time management over the last few months (and this essentially been snowballing ever since). This post focuses on Sunmi’s latest comeback, You Can’t Sit With Us, which was released last Friday. This new song is the title track off the soloist’s 3rd mini-album, 1/6. It is also the first comeback from Sunmi since the release of Tail earlier this year.

Sunmi has a pretty good track record when it comes to her discography, and You Can’t Sit With Us continues that exact trend. To clarify, You Can’t Sit With Us isn’t as iconic as her more popular releases, but it heads in that direction. The song is consistently instrumented with 80s retro synth that fits perfectly into the current KPOP climate. There isn’t anything more to the background of You Can’t Sit With Us, making this a ‘pure’ release, in terms of synths and retro influences. And for the most part, Sunmi delivers the song is her usual fashion. Sleek and elegant vocals, as per all her past comebacks. The melodies in the chorus and the hooks in You Can’t Sit With Us are okay at first. But per usual, listening to the song repetitively since its release last week has definitely helped transform the song into a catchy number. I would have liked the hooks to be a bit bolder and hence more memorable, as it felt like those elements could have gone further. But nonetheless, it is still substantial effort that puts the song in the same direction with the rest of her tracks. The only part of the song which I didn’t like was the rap sequence we got in the second verse. It was unnecessary, forced and didn’t feel fitting for the retro synth-pop song that You Can’t Sit With Us is. To be honest, I did like an idea of the rap sequence, as it does keep the song from falling into a repetitive trance. So, I think it is more execution and style that was the issue, rather than the overall presence of a rap sequence. Now I am not trying to say that Sunmi isn’t a good rapper. But I felt this was something that someone else could have handled. That or, the section in question could have been tweaked to be less drawn out and more fulfilling. Overall, You Can’t Sit With Us is another great release from the soloist.

Oh Korea. You do love yourself some zombies. This music video joins the growing appearances of the undead in a lot of their pop culture works. In this music video, one of the zombies is her recently former boyfriend. At the start of the video, it appears that Sunmi and her boyfriend were in a heated argument. He begs for forgiveness, but Sunmi was not having any of it. After a few hang ups and harsh replies via email, Sunmi throws a flowerpot out of her window, which hits her boyfriend in the head and presumably kills him. There seemed to be a tinge of regret, but she simply turns away cold-heartedly. We later see her in a video store with her friends, who are later surrounded by zombies. Sunmi and her friends launch an attack on the zombies to save themselves (after a bit of song and dance, of course, since Sunmi’s primary occupation is a KPOP idol and not zombie eradicator). After killing the final zombie, we see her ‘dead’ boyfriend appear with the flowerpot coming out of his head. He gets down on one knee and proposed to her, to which she accepts. A plot twist comes at the end of the video, with her hugging her boyfriend (who is notably uninjured – i.e. no flowerpots in his head), surrounded by police officers who had their guns drawn and directed at them. So it looks like Sunmi was really a psychopath (based on the way she turned away from her injured boyfriend and how she shot up a video store). Not too sure what to make of the video, based on that revelation. But overall, the video was a pretty decent watch, with a bit of a drama, bit of laughter, bit of action and bit of horror rolled into one.

The choreography for this comeback was decent and had that Sunmi flair. But it wasn’t as memorable as her previous comebacks. That being said, I really enjoyed the performance to watch that male dancer at the very end, who dances some of Sunmi’s more iconic moves. So far, we have seen LALALAY, Gashina and Siren. Great way of keeping me there until the end of the performance to see what he will dance to next.

Song – 8/10
Music Video – 8/10
Performance – 7.5/10
Overall Rating – 7.9/10