Dirty Work

The song

‘Dirty Work’ is a single aespa released on 27 June 2025. It carries four tracks: the song, a version featuring the American rapper Flo Milli, an English version and an instrumental. It follows the fifth mini album Whiplash of October 2024, and the sixth mini album Rich Man came two months after it, on 5 September 2025.

The album introduction on Bugs describes it as a dance track built on a synth bass and a cool vocal melody, with lyrics about deciding for yourself.

Reviews

Billboard placed the song on its list of the 25 best K-pop songs of 2025, published on 18 December 2025. The entry, written by Amina Ayoud, calls it “a track unlike anything we’ve heard from aespa before, focused mainly on conversational singing”, and describes the sound as “a grungy entry with heavy distorted bass, glitchy synths and an earworm chorus that we can’t stop singing”. The same text says the song dropped in late June and capitalised on the group’s girl-crush concept.

Numbers

The same entry sets out the year the song came out. Ayoud wrote that aespa “is no stranger to the Billboard charts, especially when it comes to album sales”, and gave the year’s figures as the ground for it. By Billboard’s account, in 2025 alone the group became the first K-pop girl group to have six projects reach the top 50 of the Billboard 200, and it took Group of the Year at Billboard Women in Music that year.

Around it

The music video went up on the official SMTOWN channel on the day of release. 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 2025.