'SUPERSTAR' by A2O SOUL, Lee Soo-man's Boy Group, Sings Its Title Three Times

A2O SOUL's 'SUPERSTAR' lasts 4 minutes and 8 seconds on streaming services, 4:12 in the video, and in all that time the boys sing their title three times, once in each chorus. It is the first song by A2O SOUL, the 15-member boy group Lee Soo-man has put together since leaving SM Entertainment, the company he founded. Its video was posted on the evening of 12 October in Korea, in the same minute as the one for 'NEON' by A2O LITE, the girl group from the same company, and the single came out on streaming services at 6 pm the next day. The label sells it under a name of its own: New Synthwave.

Stone Music, A2O's Korean distributor, explains the idea in the notes under its copy of the video. Musicians of the 1980s made sounds with synthesisers that nobody had heard before, it says, and it names three records as examples: a-ha's 'Take On Me', Harold Faltermeyer's 'Axel F' and New Order's 'Blue Monday'. A2O SOUL, it says, bring that sound back in today's terms. Those three records give us something to measure 'SUPERSTAR' against.

A2O SOUL members and where they come from

A2O SOUL have 15 members from five countries, according to the company's line-up as Korea JoongAng Daily printed it. Moon, Seoha, Hansung and See-one are from Korea and Lucien from Korea and the United States; Sora, Gaku and Sono are from Japan; Teo, Jun, Tai, Zai, Ayden and Zet from China; and Alure from Thailand. That line-up, as printed, gives no ages. Their story, in the company's telling, begins on Soulite, a planet where people can have anything they want. The boys leave it because something is still missing, and come to Earth looking for the feelings that make people want to live. 'SUPERSTAR' is billed as a pre-release single from the group's debut album, and all 15 members take part in it.

Five people share the music credit: Subhaan Rahman, Gentuar Memishi, Paris Alexa, planet emi and Yoo Young-jin, a longtime SM producer who followed Lee to A2O. The arrangement is credited to the producers HAAN and GENT!, with Yoo and Yoo Han-jin. The company says HAAN co-wrote The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber's 'STAY' and that GENT! has worked on hits for Drake and Doja Cat. Lee takes the producer credit as S.M. LEE.

What the 'SUPERSTAR' lyrics say: a light he cannot reach

The song is a love letter to someone famous, or to someone who feels that far away, and it speaks straight to them. You shine, it opens, like a fragment of a star; everyone wants you and you know it, and you slip away each time the singer almost has you. The pre-chorus calls you his midnight getaway, asks you to say in his ear all night that you will love only him, and calls you the moonlight that stays up all night at his side, asking you for strength and courage, and to stay.

In the chorus he promises to follow your bright light; then come the title, “You’re my Superstar”, and a run of six heys. After that the picture turns into a concert: a stage ready to burst, a wave to ride, and the most playful line in the song, “너의 지휘만 따라 오케스트라”, an orchestra that follows only your baton and plays a single piece. The next session, he adds, goes however you want, and the chorus ends by telling you to listen to your own heart.

By the second verse he is on his own. He follows your voice and reaches out, but you are somewhere he cannot reach, smiling brightly. You are his happy ever after, always perfect in his dreams, but the devotion is his alone, and he tells himself it is fine, it is fine, though he hates every time you go. The bridge says it outright: this may be a sad solitaire of his own, and the English line underneath remembers a promise to return. He goes back to the moment you spoke of forever, and still sees forever at your side. Then the chorus comes round a third and last time.

Is 'SUPERSTAR' synthwave? A2O's 1980s claim, tested

The video runs about 28 seconds before the first sung word; our sound classifier files the first 19 of them under ambient and new-age music. The chorus, and the title with it, comes at 0:55, 2:14 and 3:15, three times, as the lyric sheet says, and nothing in the video is louder than that last chorus from 3:15. Between 2:54 and 3:15, where the bridge should fall, our transcriber picks out no words at all, and the classifier ranks electronic music above singing. Through every section with words, singing and rhythm and blues are among the classifier's top four labels, usually just behind 'zing', a sound-effect tag. It names a synthesizer exactly once: for the final 18 seconds, after the voices stop, together with an electric piano.

Then we put the three records the label names through the same software, using the half-minute samples Apple Music offers as previews, and did the same for 'SUPERSTAR'. In tempo it is nearest to 'Axel F': about 112 beats a minute, against 117.5 for Faltermeyer's theme, 129 for 'Blue Monday' and 172 for 'Take On Me'. In both sections of the 'Blue Monday' clip the classifier's first labels are drum machine, sampler and electronic music, and the 'Axel F' clip is labelled disco, funk and house before drum machine; in the 'SUPERSTAR' clip they are rhythm and blues and singing. Of the three, it sits closest to 'Take On Me', the one sung record, sharing the labels singing and independent music, although the classifier hears no synthesizer in 'Take On Me' either, so the label alone proves little. What it does show is where the electronic sounds sit in 'SUPERSTAR': at the start, in the bridge and, as a synthesizer, at the very end. In between, its labels lead with voices.

'SUPERSTAR' comments praise the singing and miss the 2000s

Shortly after 2 am Korean time on 15 October, we sorted the 120 comments YouTube placed first under the official video. 68 are in Korean and 52 in the Latin alphabet, all but one of them in English, a far more international mix than under A2O LITE's video. About 30 talk about the singing: the high notes, the tone, the number of voices that can carry a line. Twenty-nine mention Lee Soo-man, his old company SM or his producer Yoo Young-jin, and four more call Lee by a nickname. More than twenty are some form of nostalgia, for the 2000s, for an older K-pop, for a golden era; seven mention the length, three are glad there is little or no rap, and five single out the orchestra line. The members themselves are named in three, and all three name Zet.

Five of the 120 praise how much Korean the song has. The lyric sheet is less one-sided. It has 57 lines: 31 in Korean alone, 21 in English alone and 5 that switch between them. Counted by words, the two languages come out close, 129 Korean to 121 English, though 36 of the English words are 'hey'. The verses lean Korean and the chorus is split, but the parts that stick, the title, the heys and “listen to your heart”, are in English.

A smaller crowd for 'SUPERSTAR', and a warmer one

About 53 hours after it went up, at 2:13 am Korean time on 15 October, the official video had 1,357,517 views and 52,571 likes. A2O LITE's 'NEON' video, posted the same evening, had 5,574,904, four times as many, and its song had reached No. 1 on Melon. 'SUPERSTAR' has the smaller audience but, in likes per view, the warmer one: 3.9 likes for every 100 views against 3.2 for 'NEON'.

Half is the line we are drawing. On 31 October, 'SUPERSTAR' will still have fewer than half the views of the 'NEON' video. It was gaining roughly 28,000 views an hour in the small hours of the Korean night, against about 76,000 for 'NEON', and we read that gap, measured two days in, as the order these two groups will keep rather than a launch-day accident.

Is 'SUPERSTAR' New Synthwave, then? By tempo it keeps company with 'Axel F', and its electronic sounds frame it: the ambient opening, the bridge and the keyboards that close the video. The four minutes in between belong to the voices, with the title sung three times and the hooks left to a run of heys and a line about the heart. That is the part the commenters keep praising. Not one of the 120 comments under the video mentions the 1980s or synthesizers; the acts they compare it to are the vocal-heavy SM groups they say they miss.