Highest rated kpop songs of 2025 so far

That's actually an amazing top 10

top 2 is

Papillon deserves #1

I’ll check out the Nmixx songs on here!

Yves, TripleS and ARTMS

The Jaden Jeong bias on RYM should be studied.

We can all agree that 2025 is the worst year in K-pop history.

And they are? How are we supposed to know just by their photos

Quote from jeyikal307

The Jaden Jeong bias on RYM should be studied.

I love that Odd Eye Circle is the top rated album of all time with 11k ratings! (It’s one of my all time favs too).

Quote from Bottles

I love that Odd Eye Circle is the top rated album of all time with 11k ratings! (It’s one of my all time favs too).

That one makes sense.

But the suggestion that current ARTMS - while quite good - is on the same level as imperial Loona is nonsense to me. The rest of kpop improved while Jaeden's ability to construct a great end-to-end album regressed imo.

There are so many albums I would rate over this year's ARTMS release. But everything they do, and everything TripleS does, is basically guaranteed a high rating. Yves now too, although that's only somewhat related. Like you won't convince me Soap wasn't a disappointment!

The floor is just much higher for them.

And yet idntt get no respect! Pfft.

Although I will say if it wasn't like this, it'll probably just be the typical SM glaze all the way down. Except for NCT, even though 127 is obviously the best music to ever come out from SM ever, by a huge distance.

Quote from jeyikal307

That one makes sense.

But the suggestion that current ARTMS - while quite good - is on the same level as imperial Loona is nonsense to me. The rest of kpop improved while Jaeden's ability to construct a great end-to-end album regressed imo.

There are so many albums I would rate over this year's ARTMS release. But everything they do, and everything TripleS does, is basically guaranteed a high rating. Yves now too, although that's only somewhat related. Like you won't convince me Soap wasn't a disappointment!

Interesting. If I had to guess at the connection that you mentioned, I would say Jaden Jeong is very good at producing groups that appeal to the "Kpop Aficionado" ; someone who likes kpop but shuns the top of the iceberg in favour of groups further down, and those sorts of kpop listeners are more likely to use a site like rym in the first place.

Quote from Bottles

Interesting. If I had to guess at the connection that you mentioned, I would say Jaden Jeong is very good at producing groups that appeal to the "Kpop Aficionado" ; someone who likes kpop but shuns the top of the iceberg in favour of groups further down, and those sorts of kpop listeners are more likely to use a site like rym in the first place.

OR, RYM is full of meme culture types who got into k-pop via "stan loona" and that, along with maybe hyperpop, is the extent of their pop music experience.

Consider this:

Club Icarus has more than 2,000 ratings on RYM.

So does Soft Error.

Eve: Romance has less than 400.

In fact, few k-pop releases get more than 2k ratings total.

Another way to think about this is, Pink Tape and Four Walls have fewer ratings Jaeden-era Loona releases (excluding the singles). This is not reflective of the importance of any of those releases from a historical, artistic or critical standpoint. This isn't me saying that one should be rated higher than the other, but one should certainly be more frequently rated than the other in a normal context. Just like you would expect 36 Chambers to have more ratings than The Extinction Agenda despite the latter's obvious quality.

You could say, "well, what happens is, because those Loona-adjacent albums are rated highly, they get pushed to the top-100-of-the-year lists, and then more people check them out"

And yes, but the reason they get on those lists in the first place is because you have an early set of diehards who generally vote highly and enthusiastically, setting the tone of reviews to follow and giving those releases much greater visibility.

To broaden this out from k-pop itself, this is why The Velvet Rope, the 7th highest-rated album of 1997, has the fewest ratings in the top ten. Fewer than an album by Fishmans released the same year. Fewer than at least six Charli XCX releases (while rating higher than all of them). Fewer ratings than King Crimson's utterly inconsequential Islands. Yet outside of RYM, the stature of these releases is not comparable. It's not hard to draw a straight line from this to the difference in ratings and, ultimately, reception between Eve: Romance and Soft Error. They be really liking a certain type of thing over there (although I don't want to over-generalise: Danny Brown's recent hyperpop-infused album is getting a relative drubbing which is interesting to see. It's better than Big Fish Theory! Fight me, RYM!)