2012 has been something of a banner year for producer/songwriter Shinsadong Tiger. Responsible for at least two of the year’s finest pop singles (the manic pixie space disco of T-ara’s “Lovey-Dovey,” as well as 4Minute’s “Volume Up,” which out-Gaga-ed Gaga by combining the wailing sax of “The Edge of Glory” with the gloriously belted-out choruses of “Marry the Night”), Shinsadong Tiger has struck gold again with another hit T-ara collaboration. The drama of T-ara’s recent scandal, which resulted in the exit of singer/rapper Hwayoung, lends a dark undercurrent to “Sexy Love,” and the video, featuring doll-bots breaking free from their containment units, frames the whole song as a commentary on the girl group’s position in the broader entertainment-industrial complex. Beginning with synths that resemble emergency sirens, “Sexy Love” is the sound of the girl group in crisis, and the song’s mock-seductive chorus goes just a step too far, as T-ara tend to do, edging into the territory of the absurd. “Sexy eyes, sexy nose, sexy mouth“: to break down the body this way is not a sign of love but of convulsive terror, sheer instability.