Better Things

The song

‘Better Things’ is an English single aespa released in 2023. The album information page on Bugs dates it 8 September and carries four tracks: the song, a sped-up version, a slowed-down version and a ‘Snack Ver.’.

The album introduction on Bugs describes it as an up-tempo dance track with a bright percussion sound and a rhythm pattern of its own, and says the lyrics are about spending the time you have on what is worth more. The song was carried again in November by the fourth mini album Drama.

Reviews

Kim Tae-hoon of IZM read the song’s approach against the releases before it. He wrote that “it is a single aimed at the English-speaking market, but rather than a grand shape it takes the pressure off and comes at it lightly”, and of the arrangement that “the minimal structure, built around piano and percussion, brings out the members’ dreamlike vocal style and makes the most of a cool summer feeling”. Of the lyrics he wrote that “the words, which carry a self-directed attitude and a confidence in the aespa brand itself, stop short of the profound while still setting the group’s identity firmly”.

Paste, in the United States, placed the song eleventh on its 20 best K-pop songs of the year, published on 24 December 2023. The entry, written by Kayti Burt, says that “in breezy summer hit ‘Better Things,’ Karina, Giselle, Winter, and Ningning’s vocal color gets a chance to shine”.

IZM returned to the song three months later in its review of Drama, the mini album that carries it. Jang Jun-hwan wrote that the record, “having filled its contents with B-sides in a professional SMP style, then closed the wrapping with ‘Drama’, in which the early and late states are solemnly overlaid, and ‘Better things’, a track into which the detail of the present current is softly dissolved”.

Numbers

The song stood at number eleven on Paste’s 20 best K-pop songs of 2023. Idology’s column on new releases did not run between June 2023 and December 2025, so the month this song came out was never covered there, and the song does not appear in any of the outlet’s three year-end pieces for 2023.

Around it

The music video went up on the official SMTOWN channel on 18 August 2023. The album introduction to the single ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ on the same platform also dates this song to 18 August.