It’s that series that nobody actually reads, but that still gets more traffic than the k-pop artists it features – that’s right folks, it’s time for another episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!

Regular readers will know that Kpopalypse Nugu Alert is a series that focuses on the music and the music videos of Korea’s lesser known groups (“nugu” = “unknown”, literally “who?”). As Kpopalypse is always about inclusivity, and has been involved in the “nugu” end of my own country’s music scene for many years, I certainly sympathise with the plight of unknown struggling performers. However, there’s a problem with this – just to even get to the level where one can produce a halfway-decent (or maybe not at all decent) music video, is still a lot of time a money, something which the most nugu of groups often cannot afford to spend. Since Kpopalypse Nugu Alert is very much focused on the MVs, this means that the most nugu of the nugus – the ones that need exposure more than any others – are the ones that most consistently miss out on a coveted Nugu Alert feature. It’s time to redress this unfortunate barrier to entry and give some video-less nugus their due!

It’s true that Kpopalypse generates a lot of web traffic, but it’s mostly from people who are searching for k-pop girl nudity and end up getting trolled with cat photo dumps and JYP’s plastic pants. My data shows that not many people are out there feverishly searching for new Korean groups that nobody has fucking heard of, just ask the long-suffering (and recently reactivated) Korean Indie about that one. As a result, the limited reach of my blogging in this series probably isn’t going to skyrocket anybody here to instant fame. All I can do is bring some joy into the lives of the few dedicated caonimas who are determined enough to devote their valuable time and energy into reading this series. With the concept of “bringing joy” in mind, I’ve chosen k-pop girl groups for this round of video-less songs, as this is a popular preference among the few Nugu Alert readers that exist.

The usual rules apply:

Less than 20k views across official channels (scratch that, these groups don’t even fucking HAVE official channels)

(scratch that, these groups don’t even fucking HAVE official channels) Probably not known to your average BTS fan

Relevant to Kpopalypse, just because

Let’s take a look at some tunes in what is probably one of the most nugu Kpopalypse nugu alerts ever created!

Flywithme – Your Face

With each of these artists I’ve tried to provide more than one unofficial video of some type, to allow you to both hear a reasonable audio quality so you can appreciate the song (or not), and also receive a general idea of the look of the group. In the case of “Fly With Me”, they certainly seem to be working the “adult-oriented” end of idol pop, an observation confirmed by a cursory glance at their official Facebook page and Instagram account. This adult focus is also re-confirmed by a quick look at their live video, which shows a bunch of clothes strewn about the stage, clearly the girls were involved in some kind of outer-layer strip-off that happened a few minutes before the above video was shot. Unfortunately the song is the weak link, a fairly painful number with a particularly annoying chorus ruined by the presence of some really questionably-tuned vocal harmony parts. I guess it’s probably just as well that most of their fans probably didn’t come for the music.

YouTube views at time of writing: not applicable

Notable attribute: plastic over the speakers indicate that this is a wet-weather performance, yet nobody slips in those high-heels, Gfriend take note

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

A.B.O – Luv Me

A.B.O, who are unfortunately not an f(x) tribute group, don’t have much of a song either. Not that it’s super easy to assess the song quality accurately as all I was able to dig up in terms of sonics was this one solitary fancam where the audio from the fairly medium-sized PA system is mostly being blown away in the wind. The Seoul Family Festival is actually a reasonably big event as it happens, so I guess A.B.O were playing on the designated nugus stage. Just because the visuals of the fancam aren’t much, I added another second video where the girls run through one of Oh My Girl’s album tracks “One Step Two Step“, which definitely isn’t an amazing song by any stretch, but is certainly still a lot better than the other song they do, or in fact anything else you’re going to hear in this episode. Anyway this group are in fact so nugu that they never even made it to debut, and broke up not only before a music video came out, but even before any song of theirs was released as a single. For all I know the first video is not even their song either, but apparently they did perform it a few times so there is at least a reasonable chance that what we’re hearing is “Luv Me” and not some other girl group’s crappy B-side that I’ve heard maybe once and don’t recognise. It’s hard being sure about something that doesn’t exist.

YouTube views at time of writing: not applicable

Notable attribute: stage collision between the two middle girls in the second video at 0:29, watch the daggers in their eyes as they take about 20 seconds to gradually regain their aegyo mojo, here’s another angle if you want it

Nugu Alert rating: off the chart

BJ Girls – Blue Fire

If A.B.O had too much music quality for your liking, then perhaps you’ll enjoy this offering from the unfortunately-named BJ Girls, who deserve some sort of award for “group name least likely to successfully cross over to English speaking k-pop audiences”. However if you can extract your minds from the gutter for ten seconds (any more than that would be unrealistic for a Kpopalypse reader I guess), the BJ in the name actually means “Broadcast Jockey”, and the group is made up entirely of girls who are v-loggers on Afreeca.tv (and not the only ones, look out for a group called Violet scheduled to debut later this year, also purely made up of Afreeca.tv “stars”). The lack of any sort of musical pedigree here definitely shows, as the girls can barely scrape together a melody between them over the generic dance groove which would actually sound quite a lot better without their warbling over the top of it, but what’s even more odd is that for a group who have so far made a living from their visuals on the screen, they have no recorded footage of them performing their song at all, anywhere. The best I could do was the second video with two of the girls… doing other stuff. Not BJs, unfortunately.

YouTube views at time of writing: not applicable

Notable attribute: the wayward vocals are oddly not pitch-corrected – one of those rare examples of a k-pop song where you actually wish that they used more Autotune

Nugu Alert rating: off the chart

That’s all for this episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert! Kpopalypse will return at a future date, with more nugus!