![]() However, when I first listened to the song I felt the beat was a bit weaker compared to previous songs, which made me worried it wouldn’t have as much impact. Irene: I thought that ‘Russian Roulette’ was going to be similar to ‘Ice Cream Cake’ or ‘Dumb Dumb’, since many people loved these. ![]() Wendy: Maybe because I was used to previous songs like ‘Ice Cream Cake’ or ‘Dumb Dumb’, (but) when I heard the medium tempo I thought, ‘Shouldn’t it be a little faster?’ But although we listened to the song more than a hundred times a day when we practiced, I never got tired of it and started to like it more each time. What did you each think when you first heard it? ‘Russian Roulette’ feels like the most mature ‘red’ Red Velvet lead track so far. We sat down to get to know them, their fanbase, their latest album – and what the past two years as one of K-Pop’s most successful young groups has taught them. But it may also be attributed to Red Velvet’s relatability – the band are a sum of many parts, from feisty to deep thinking and introverted. Perhaps their pop haven, free of overt sexualisation or unrealistic stereotypes, is partly the reason the group has found a forcefully loyal following from their peers, one that gave “Russian Roulette” an impressive run on the multitude of South Korean charts. Joy impulsively mentioned that they’d no longer be separate themes on the music show Show Champion, a rare moment of casualness in the usually very calculated world of K-Pop.Ī ‘sisterhood’ is the clearest way to describe Red Velvet – only once has anyone outside of the group featured in one of their videos (a seconds-long crowd shot of faces and bodies – blurred, as if they couldn’t properly exist in the group’s complex and enigmatic world). But with their new, third mini-album Russian Roulette, the group continue to do things on their own terms, effectively tossing out the very concept on which they were built by marrying both their ‘red’ and ‘velvet’ sides. Initially forming as a four-piece (Yeri, their youngest member, joined in early 2015), Red Velvet demonstrated their competing sounds on double A-side singles like “Ice Cream Cake” and “Automatic”, further cementing the ‘red’/‘velvet’ divide with their full-length album Red in 2015, which was entirely dedicated to uptempo experiments in pop, electronica, and dance, including the indomitable “Dumb Dumb”. Though they’re still seen as newcomers as far as K-Pop’s hierarchy is concerned, two years on since they debuted with “Happiness” and Red Velvet’s Irene, Seulgi, Wendy, Joy, and Yeri are still messing with the rules. Red Velvet, on the other hand, have a fanbase of predominantly young women, and they’re neither sexy nor innocent, with music videos that are often dark, trippy, sinister, or haunting, even when they’re flooded in pastel colours. But it wasn’t just their music that set them apart: with the exception of acts like 2NE1 and Girls’ Generation, the target audience for K-Pop girl groups is generally men, with a tendency to box artists into the categories of either ‘sexy’ or ‘innocent’, existing (like most women in pop) to serve a fantasy as much as to entertain. When Red Velvet exploded into the public consciousness in 2014, they were embarking on an intriguing dual concept that was uncommon for a female K-Pop group, pitching a slower, R&B-based sound (‘velvet’) against catchy pop music (‘red’).
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