Profile trail: ARrC · Final-lineup music video review

RaeRae Reacts

awesome: ARrC Turned a Bad Day Into a Crunk Support Group

ARrC took one terrible school day, invited a goblin, and yelled “awesome” until the bad mood became choreography. This should feel corny. Somehow the bass saves it.

Artist: ARrC

Released: July 16, 2025

Album: HOPE

Sound: Y2K Southern hip-hop, crunk, chant-pop

Lyrics: Youra (Full8loom)

Composed by: Benjamin 55, Stary 55, Jeffrey Paul Allen

Arrangement: Benjamin 55, Stary 55

Lineup: Hyunmin, Kien, Choi Han, Andy, Rioto, Doha, Jibeen

My actual first reaction

First thought: Oh, this bass is filthy. The school-uniform styling tried to warn me that youth was about to become a group project, but the production walked in wearing heavy boots.

Sound check: Crunk drums, blunt chants, flashes of melody, and enough low end to make “positive thinking” sound mildly threatening.

The moment I leaned in: The hook does not beg to be pretty. It commits to the word until the repetition becomes the joke and the release.

The side-eye: A better bridge could have given the vocal line more room. I wanted one full melodic exhale before the final pileup.

Current status: Added. I apparently accept motivational speeches when delivered over Southern hip-hop percussion.

What the song is actually doing

“awesome” is about the stupid little disasters that can ruin a day before anything truly terrible has happened. You oversleep. You miss the bus. Somebody is watching you fail in public. The room feels hostile. The song does not solve any of it. ARrC changes the response instead. If the day insists on being ridiculous, yell back something equally unreasonable.

That is why the repeated title works. “Awesome” begins as sarcasm, the verbal equivalent of staring at a broken zipper and laughing because the alternative is screaming. By the final chorus, it has turned sincere. Not inspirational-poster sincere. More like seven friends deciding the disaster will become a story before it becomes a defeat.

The sound: dirty bass, clean purpose

The production reaches back to Y2K Southern hip-hop and crunk without sanding the genre into polite K-pop décor. The drums land hard. The chant is intentionally blunt. Small vocal details keep the track from becoming one long sports cheer, but rhythm is the real lead singer here.

ARrC sells that choice because the members do not perform the hook like a slogan handed down by management. Hyunmin and Choi Han give the rap sections the necessary bite. Kien and Doha keep the melodic passages from drying out. Andy’s presence adds another sharp performance color, while Rioto and Jibeen make the formation changes feel restless rather than busy. The song understands that confidence can be manufactured in real time. Sometimes you do not feel brave until your friends start yelling with you.

The principal MV: school anxiety meets a dokkaebi

The Performance Video strips the song down to formation pressure, footwork, and synchronized accents. The narrative details below belong to the principal MV, linked above, and explain the wider HOPE concept.

The school is not a cute campus. Students bow their heads under surveillance. Multilingual graffiti covers the walls. ARrC stands apart in color and posture, already behaving like the rules have lost their authority. Then an emotionless goblin named MU walks into the story because apparently ordinary teenage stress was not dramatic enough.

That goblin matters. Korean dokkaebi are not simply Western-style evil monsters. They can be disruptive, strange, funny, frightening, and fond of testing human behavior. MU turns emotional numbness into a visible character. ARrC’s answer is noise, movement, color, and connection. The video makes “hope” physical without forcing every prop to become homework.

Easter eggs and surprises

• MU is one of five goblins introduced for the HOPE era, each tied to a different emotional condition.
• The multilingual writing echoes ARrC’s multinational membership rather than treating the school as one culturally blank room.
• The lowered heads versus ARrC’s upright posture tells the song’s entire emotional story before the chorus finishes.
• The performance version exposes how much of the hook lives in formation pressure, footwork, and the members hitting the same accent together.

RaeRae verdict

I like this more than I expected. “Awesome” is not deep because it hides a tragic secret under the floorboards. It is deep enough because it understands a very normal survival skill: turning embarrassment into a joke before embarrassment gets ownership of the room.

I still want a stronger bridge and a little more vocal breathing space. The track is so committed to momentum that it nearly forgets contrast. But the hook stays in my head, the bass has actual personality, and the goblin did not arrive merely to pose for screenshots. That puts the song comfortably above “cute concept, next.”

Keep digging

Meet ARrC and the members Hyunmin, Kien, Choi Han, Andy, Rioto, Doha, and Jibeen. Then read why the lineup changed in eight days and why the ending felt especially frustrating.

Receipts

• ETNews: the school, MU, and teaser story
• Manila Bulletin: album and song meaning
• Bugs: licensed track credits, runtime, and lyrics
• Genie: official album metadata and description
• Star News Korea: July 16 showcase and point choreography
• Weverse: official MV commentary

Return to Top ↑

Two official videos, one complete React

The music video and performance video are not competing releases. They answer different questions. The MV turns school anxiety into a comic supernatural interruption: pressure builds, a dokkaebi barges into the day, and ARrC converts dread into collective momentum. The performance cut removes that story scaffolding and tests whether the seven can still make the hook feel like an event. They can. The song’s appeal survives because the formation behaves like a group argument that keeps resolving into a party.

The final seven each have a job

Hyunmin and Choi Han give the rap sections their spine. Kien keeps the brighter vocal color from becoming sugary. Andy fits the revised lineup without performing the uncomfortable fiction that the group never had an earlier version. Rioto brings control to the dance line, while Doha carries the vocal weight and Jibeen sharpens the youthful energy. Ziwoo is part of ARrC history, but not this release; adding him to the “awesome” relationship would make the archive less accurate, not more complete.

Why the international trail was harder than the song

This is exactly the kind of release international fans should have been able to follow from one clean official path. Instead, an overseas listener could encounter the performance video first, miss the MV story, find a lineup notice through a translation account and only later realize which seven members belonged to the era. That is not mysterious promotion. It is administrative hide-and-seek. A small fandom will do the detective work because it cares; the company should not treat that unpaid labor as the distribution plan.

The fix was never a giant American campaign. A pinned multilingual release index, consistent titles, connected playlists, translated lineup notices and a simple “start here” page would have done real work. Weekly content only helps when viewers can tell what is new, what is canonical and where it fits. ARrC had the material. The path outside Korea kept breaking into pieces.

Bottom line

“awesome” takes a bad school day, drops dirty bass underneath it and lets seven boys turn mutual panic into a crunk support group. The MV gives the concept its joke; the performance version proves the hook and choreography do not need the joke to survive. It is playful without becoming weightless, and it makes the final lineup feel coherent instead of recently assembled.

What changed every time I replayed it

First replay: the bass and ridiculous school-day rescue. Second replay: Choi Han and Rioto controlling the transitions. Third replay: how much Kien and Doha keep the hook open while the rappers rough up the edges. After that, I stopped treating the performance upload as bonus content. It is the second half of the review, because it shows the machinery underneath the fun.

The concept works because it refuses to sulk

School-pressure concepts often announce seriousness by draining every color and making the performers stare at fluorescent lights. “awesome” takes the opposite route. It recognizes the bad day, then gives the boys a ridiculous collective mechanism for surviving it. The dokkaebi is not a profound solution to academic anxiety. It is permission for the video to break its own tension and let the beat become the escape hatch.

That choice keeps the track from overselling itself. ARrC are not claiming one hook fixes anybody’s life. They are showing how shared foolishness can interrupt a spiral long enough to breathe. The performance video makes that argument physically: formations close, split and reconnect, so the support-group idea remains visible even without desks, hallways or supernatural interference.