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Aespa: Armageddon review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

Cutesy melodies, dubstep basslines, pop-punk and disco on the K-pop foursome’s debut album are outshone by their intriguing world-building, with interdimensional rifts and alien popcorn

As far as one could discern before being overwhelmed by the urge to go and have a little lie down in a darkened room, the story now is that the world is threatened by an extinction-level event involving mystifying meteorological phenomena, a supernova, and mysterious pieces of alien popcorn that may in fact be “a manifestation of interdimensional rifts that allow glimpses into a parallel universe”. Clocking in at half an hour, which makes it something of an epic by K-pop girl group standards – Blackpink’s two albums to date were each over in 24 minutes – Armageddon’s songs are the handiwork of writing and production teams who frequently hail from Sweden and the US, but seem to concentrate more or less exclusively on the South Korean market. The sonics of K-pop have been subject to an overhaul of late – artists including NewJeans and Fifty Fifty have minted an appealingly airy and lithe sound that suggests someone in the vast entertainment organisations of Seoul has been listening to PinkPantheress – but Armageddon sticks with the familiar old model: grinding, lurching dubstep-derived basslines and rapping that shifts from English to Korean and back again, sometimes within the space of line; sudden jump-cuts to cutesy pop melodies and Auto-Tuned harmony vocals overlaid with fizzing EDM synths.

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