Nothing but a month ago SM Entertainment unveiled their newest girl group that they plan on shipping to America, 9LIVES and promised music almost immediately. Consisting of Billie, Mint, Jackie, Charlie, Kali, Alyx, Chanel, Raven and JJ, these nine girls are serving up a sweet helping of crossover pop as only SM Entertainment signees have in the past. To Be Loved is their first single and it's a good one.

Going in, this song reminds you strongly of a retro tune, the kinds of songs coming out of girl bands back in the 50s and 60s. It's updated for the modern era, with a cool rap from Mint, but has some of the backing horns and guitars and general peppiness of a previous generation. The chorus is classic K-pop, and definitely hook-filled, serving 2 great ones like the Pop driven "Because boy I got you, through the thick, thin and lacking/Baby boy I got got got you, without you even asking" and the sexy chant, "How does it feel, how does it feel, how does it feel to be loved?"

The message of the song? They've got love for you even when no one else does.

I've rarely been disappointed by a K-pop song (though I have learned to redirect my attention to the videos in bad times), and this debut track from 9LIVES is no exception. Many may think this song comes off a little messy but it's a bold sprint of energy that shows it's versatility in not only genres but tempos. It's light, poppy, upbeat, and a great song to lift your mood just a bit.

After a few articles and boycotts telling us not to support SM Entertainment or their obvious replacement for Mi•Mi, their newest girl group 9LIVES have debuted with their first single To Be Loved. While the idea of new music from new artists is exciting, the song itself doesn't do much more than excite the critics to finally be able to write a bad review in 2016. To Be Loved fails to craft a memorable identity for 9LIVES to call its own, unless the identity SM Entertainment was aiming for is the one girl group we can count on to release horrible music that'll cloud up the radio anyway because payola miracles.

Part of the problem with To Be Loved is that it’s incredibly forgettable. It tries so hard to be catchy with 2 hooks, dozens of melodies, and at lest 4 beat changes but it only comes off as annoying. Very very annoying. While the song is kicked off strongly by 3 of the members, it all falls flat before giving the song any promising power, the production is a muddled loud mess of electronic thwomps and synths that doesn’t vary enough between verses, choruses and hooks to really gain any momentum. It tries to be too many things at once, without a connecting element that brings it all together. We’ve got hip hop, cutesy pop fluff and noisy electronic breakdowns. This, my friends, is the dark side of K-pop that we've gotten ourselves tangled up in.

To Be Loved starts off in one gear and stays on auto-pilot (which glitches bad by the way) for its overly-long four-and-a-half minute running time. The crammed production isn’t helped by the aggressively processed and double-tracked vocals of the members as it leaves the instrumentals and the singers sounding incredibly one-note. The song tries to counter this through sheer volume, as if slightly increasing the speed of the synths equates to genuine thrills but it doesn’t do much more than drown out everything around it and increase the need for an Advil. By the time the last synth mercifully blares, it’s hard to recall any single moment of To Be Loved because the whole track blends together into a mediocre deflating balloon of pop noise.

As far as the lyrics go, they aren't half bad. There's really great technique within the writing, it just feels as if there's a few too many. The song overall is about having a strong love for someone who doesn't have a clue. At one point in the song, the girls are singing out of the purity of unrequited love, claiming that they don't need anything in return for the endearment they give because they are just decent people who love you. Yet just seconds later, this love seems to be thriving off of the possibility that one day you MIGHT discover their love by accident (I guess) and they'll have the pleasure of asking, "how does it feel?". As if that wasn't enough, it doesn't take long before the song completely just turns into an anthem of adoration (which for starters isn't love) as they go on to sing you're the light of their day and claim that unlike the others they appreciate and understand your whole shtick, even though they admit to knowing close to nothing about you. It feels as if the writers of the song just took the pen and pad one at a time and passed it around like some joint. Thanks to the absolute lack in making the objective clear, the song comes off as a stalker's note with good intention and a lot of pink.

Oh, and I would say Mint can't rap but she's not even in the writing credits so so much for that! The complete fail on the writing makes absolutely no sense with the lineup given in the credits. The pure fact that Airemese Smith had any part in writing this discombobulating mess is beyond possibilities. Did Yasmine really climb out of the sewers of Malaysia for this? We're talking about the woman who wrote Proposition, Like A Christmas Toy and Bless Me in the same year! You can't even hold Misu and Mae Na responsible for this, they had always played a huge part in the music of their own girl group, Mi•Mi, who's work always had a great melody and lyrics that outdid themselves with limited English. The only way these 4 ladies could come together and make this is if they all got sloppy drunk and hired a bunch of 5th graders to ghostwrite it for them. In contrast, the production can be explained for by the fact that Flame 1&2 were in charge of it. Their production had always been hyper and heavily influenced by the latest Hip Hop trends, but this track is the very reason why their career in producing Pop music should've ended a long time ago.

Overall, To Be Loved isn't just bad, it's disappointing. It feels as if this whole song was just generated for a few spins on radio and a bunch of views on YouTube which will ultimately result in lots of money. Mi•Mi might've been nothing but cash cows to the industry but at least they had the quality to win over the hearts of critics and people all around the world. Everything about 9LIVES, from the image to the music, feels fresh out of a sweatshop.