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Even as K-pop megagroup SEVENTEEN comes to a brief standstill for its military hiatus era, its latest unit is firing on all cylinders.

The aptly named V8’s team-up was, by all accounts, a no-brainer, considering their in-sync tastes: heady European EDM for THE 8 — who hails from a coastal province in China and moonlights as a DJ — and hyperpop-adjacent sounds bred by the internet for Seoul-via-New-York rapper VERNON. After over a decade together, the two members knew how well these influences mesh, theoretically; the question became how to actually execute that far-flung fusion.

To do so, the duo leaned on Alice Longyu Gao, an experimental artist who’s been reshaping K-pop as we know it. (In 2023, she recorded a TikTok soundbite with The Chainsmokers that would come to serve as the bedrock for KATSEYE’s off-the-wall — and influential — hit “Gnarly.”) Gao introduced V8 to certain wishlist producers like Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, among others.

Produced by Mechatok, their lead single “singasong” is just as silly as the title suggests, with its equally irreverent MV pulling out all the stops: bodybuilders, CGI Transformers, monster trucks, sing-along lyrics, a chimeric horse and — most importantly — lots of LMFAO-style shuffling. But in the tradition of genre forebearers PC Music, there’s a heart behind the exaggerated front.

Because while K-pop’s practically gotten its methodology down to a science, V8 went off in search of genuine expression. “I don’t think authenticity is something you can calculate or artificially make,” VERNON says. “But works that feel authentic are what reach out to me the most. They sound like, or look like, or feel like actual stories — what people actually go through.”

Their goal was to capture that kind of magic, VERNON adds, and ultimately, “I hope we’re able to reach our listeners in the same way.”

The self-titled V8 album thus has both their fingerprints and feelings: Innuendo goes hand in hand with ennui on Pharrell co-creation “girlsnboys” (“She can’t get out of bed when she home … I think the girls and boys are so tired“). Meanwhile, VERNON and THE 8 spout real guilt on imposter syndrome party anthem “rat race,” holding a mirror up to the machine that made them.

“We just do everything our way,” THE 8 says. “We got involved in every part because we’re trying to do what we want, how we want. I think, because of that, more of who we are as people will be felt.”

Below, the duo breaks down every track on V8, out now.

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