Well this is embarrassing. You see, the other day, I’m doing my idol homework and doop-dee-doop, hey look a POPPiNG EMO thing, let’s do something with it! From which descended a few quickie takes that happen when I’m scouting but don’t intend to write a thing yet, which is to say that I was mostly just skipping through isolated 2-3 second clips of the video to make a snap decision about what to do with it. And friends, let me tell you, every one of those takes was the wrong take.

The dominant one was “oh hey what the heck POPPiNG EMO,” more cogently expressed as “this is not what I expected from POPPiNG EMO and a song called ‘NIGHTMARE’.” Which is dumb. So here:

The much more logical response is to make that “oh I know” face and nod to yourself, perhaps in time with the beat, and then go about your day. After all, is the song bad? It certainly is not! It is a very nice power ballad in fact, with a lovely hook and some interesting instrumental parts under the vocals. And is the video bad? Also no! It’s quite pretty, professionally done, hits the emotional notes, completely competent and appropriate. And it turns out that, if you go revisit POPPiNG EMO’s other recent MV history (go ahead; I’ll wait), you’ll realize (as I did) that this is actually who and what they are, and on a clear trajectory to boot, and that’s probably the SCRAMBLES talking as much as anything. Yes they’ve been/done more punk in the past, but this is idol and at this point having terribly firm expectations should be something that we’ve all worked out of ourselves.

But anyway! Nice work overall. And now I have fulfilled the word count for this post about POPPiNG EMO!