poppop - The 2nd Mini Album - EP

For their sophomore mini album, K-pop boy group NCT WISH leans into love. <i>poppop</i> came out a little more than a year after the NCT subunit’s long-awaited debut in February 2024, and it bops from a place of youthful earnestness. In the onomatopoeic dance-pop title track, members Sion, Riku, Yushi, Jaehee, Ryo, and Sakuya compare love to cloudlike cotton candy, soda pop in the starlight, and juicy bubblegum, evoking a sweet, retro flavor of infatuation.

The sense of wide-eyed wonder continues on tracks like “Silly Dance,” a high-energy song about letting loose in front of one’s crush, and “Still 3PM,” an R&B-inspired pop track about waiting for the person you like to come over. The latter song references Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s <i>The Little Prince</i>, a classic story that also inspired NCT WISH’s SM Entertainment <i>sunbaenim</i> RYEOWOOK. Notably, all six tracks on <i>poppop</i> are sung in English and Korean despite the group featuring majority Japanese members, highlighting the multinational fluidity of NCT WISH.