RAERAE REACTS · tripleS
Girls Never Die: tripleS Put 24 Girls in a Graveyard and Still Made the Ending Feel Like Flight
Twenty-four members, one fan-chosen title track, a cemetery, a collapsing city, and a chorus stubborn enough to drag everybody back toward daylight.
Official music video
My actual first reaction
First thought: I expected the logistical miracle of fitting 24 women into a video. I did not expect the video to look me in the face and ask whether surviving the week counts as heroism. Apparently it does.
Sound check: Up-tempo house drums, synth bass, rock guitar, and vocals that float instead of trying to overpower the production. The beat moves like somebody walking because stopping would be worse.
The moment I leaned in: The graveyard formation. Twenty-four bodies should look like a crowd. Here they look like proof that nobody has to crawl out alone.
The side-eye: A song with 24 members was never going to give every woman a satisfying vocal chapter. Some faces register as flashes. The video makes the collective point work, but individual discovery still requires homework and probably a seating chart.
Current status: Emotional, impressed, and counting heads like a field-trip chaperone with trust issues.
The song fans chose for all 24
“Girls Never Die” did not simply arrive as the company-selected single. WAV voted through the Grand Gravity process, choosing it as the title track for the first album featuring the completed 24-member lineup. That detail matters because tripleS sells participation as part of its structure. Fans do not only consume the result. They help select the road.
Fan voting can sound like a cute marketing feature until the winning song has to carry the weight of the full-group arrival. “Girls Never Die” was the right choice. It is large enough for the formation without becoming a military parade, and emotional enough to make the number feel human.
The full-group debut could have been nothing but spectacle. Look, all 24 fit on the stage. Please clap for mathematics. Instead, the song treats assembly as survival. The group becomes powerful because the girls arrive with separate damage and refuse to disappear separately.
What “Girls Never Die” is saying
The central phrase is not literal immortality. It is refusal. The lyrics move through collapse, fear, and the decision to rise anyway. That can sound dangerously close to motivational-wallpaper pop, but the production and video keep dirt under the fingernails.
These girls do not begin in a triumphant stadium. They are scattered through worn rooms, rooftops, streets, and moments that suggest exhaustion or emotional crisis. The world looks indifferent. Nobody arrives with a glittering speech about self-esteem. Movement becomes the speech.
The recurring “we go, we high” works because it is simple enough to yell while running. I do not need a twelve-line philosophy during the chorus. I need the handhold.
There is also a useful difference between “girls never cry” and “girls never die.” Crying is allowed. Breaking down is visible all over the video. The promise is not that strong girls remain pretty and dry-eyed. The promise is that collapse does not get the final edit.
The music carries sadness without becoming a ballad
EL CAPITXN, NANO, and Zenur build the track around motion. The house pulse refuses to sit down, while the guitar adds friction under vocals that often sound airy or tired. That contrast is the engine. If everybody screamed confidence over heavy drums, the song would lose the vulnerability that makes its confidence believable.
The verses do not waste time introducing 24 solo personalities. They work more like fragments passed from one member to the next. The voice changes, the sentence continues. Normally I complain when a large-group song slices lines into samples. Here the construction supports the meaning. No single girl owns survival.
The chorus is repetitive. Yes. It is also designed for a formation this large and a message this blunt. Repetition becomes insistence. Some days growth is not elegant. It is saying the same necessary thing until your body agrees.
The video turns despair into a group project
UNDERMOOD FILM had already helped shape tripleS videos around young women moving through recognizable Seoul spaces. “Girls Never Die” takes that everyday texture somewhere darker. The locations feel lived in rather than assembled in a spotless concept warehouse.
Early scenes isolate members inside their own problems. Even when other people exist nearby, the emotional frame stays narrow. As the song builds, the separate stories begin to rhyme. We see different forms of weariness, danger, and alienation, then the choreography gathers those fragments into one body.
The cemetery imagery is the obvious centerpiece. It could have become tacky in approximately half a second. The direction avoids treating graves as gothic decoration. The members rise and move together, while birds lift into the sky. The image turns the title into action without adding a neon sign that says SYMBOLISM.
I also like that beauty does not sanitize the distress. The cinematography is gorgeous, but the spaces remain uncomfortable. tripleS still looks like an idol group. The world around them does not suddenly become an advertisement for resilience.
Twenty-four members: miracle and problem
Let us be honest. Twenty-four is ridiculous. That is part of the charm, and it is also an editorial problem with hair and microphones. A three-minute song cannot give every member a memorable line, reaction, symbol, close-up, and tiny personal resurrection.
The choreography solves the scale better than the line distribution can. Choi Hyoje uses the group as architecture. Members split, cluster, surround, and reform. The formations are not background decoration around three favored faces. The size itself becomes the visual hook.
Still, a new viewer may leave remembering the mood more than the women. That is where the modular system and profile material have to do the next job. The video makes me want to learn them. It cannot finish the assignment for me.
Easter eggs and details worth keeping
- The birds: A visual release after all the grounded, trapped imagery. Flight arrives as a group event.
- The graves: Not proof the girls died, but a visual argument that an ending can become a starting position.
- The separate rooms: Private pain first, collective movement later. The edit changes the social scale of the problem.
- The fan-chosen song: WAV selected the track that would introduce OT24, so the chorus about “we” reaches beyond the members without pretending fans wrote the lyrics.
- The number itself: The final completed lineup is not hidden. Formations repeatedly ask us to feel the force of 24.
What I would change
I would give the bridge more breathing room. The song is already emotionally ambitious, and one longer vocal passage could have created a stronger contrast before the final chorus. I would also steal thirty seconds from the industry’s fear of four-minute songs and spend it on a few more individual faces.
That said, “Girls Never Die” is not failing because I want more of it. The compression is occasionally frustrating, but the core idea survives intact.
Meet all 24 members and follow the units through the tripleS profile.
Final take
“Girls Never Die” could have been the world’s longest attendance check. Instead, tripleS made its completed lineup feel like the answer to the song. One girl can fall. Twenty-four can build a formation around the hole.
The track is moving without begging, the video is dark without using pain as expensive wallpaper, and the scale finally has a reason beyond novelty.