As mentioned last week’s review for Super Shy and the day before yesterday’s review for Cool With You, NewJeans was scheduled to make their official comeback yesterday with the release of their second mini-album, Get Up, and the mini-album’s third lead single ETA.

While I was impressed with Super Shy and disappointed with Cool With You, I find myself to be on the fence with ETA. I find the upbeat nature of the song to be a strong aspect of the song, and it sounds like that is a bit of a party flair to it. The vocals were solid, and I liked the chanty nature of the “What’s your ETA?” hook that forms part of the chorus. All of this brought a nice level of excitement to the song. One of the issues with ETA is that repetitive nature of the instrumental. While I usually don’t have much of an issue with repetition (which NewJeans and their producers employ a lot in their songs), I did feel like the repeated brassy-like synth was a bit much for me. I already didn’t enjoy as much in the first instance, and having it on repeat for majority of ETA doesn’t really help much. It stole the attention away from the vocals and clashed with the rest of the song by being overly prominent. Also, I didn’t remember that much from the verses and wanted more from them. Those were the big sticking points of ETA for me, but the rest of ETA falls into the nice and pleasant category.

This entire video was a product placement for the iPhone 14. I don’t think it was necessary to have the members hold a mobile throughout the entire video, as this just felt so forced and made for a distraction from the storyline, which I felt was the main star of the video. On that front, however, I am impressed. The video features a dark twist, in an otherwise vibrant video. The NewJeans members call up their friend after noticing her boyfriend was getting friendly with another girl at a party. The NewJeans members proceed to keep tabs on the boyfriend and his new friend, while their friend beelines to where the group is. A lot of emotions is felt by the friend, who surprises the boyfriend and his new girl by hitting them on the road. At first, it was a no fatality/injury crash with the boyfriend and his new girl on the car bonnet. But I guess her anger sees her drive over the pair off-screen, with the guy (and presumably his new girl) stuffed into the boot of the car as she drives to an isolated place to get rid of the evidence of their murders (as alluded to by part of the boyfriend’s shirt sticking out from the boot).

The performance for ETA is both familiar and refreshing. It felt very much like NewJeans’ style in terms of formation and execution, but it is also felt summery and vibrant. The members members felt like they had a more relaxed demeanour/mindset to the performance, and the appeared to look like they were having genuine fun on stage.

Song – 7.5/10
Music Video – 8.5/10
Performance – 9/10
Overall Rating – 8.1/10