Glow Up

The record

Glow Up is RESCENE’s second mini album, released on 5 February 2025. It has five tracks: the title track ‘Glow Up’, ‘CRASH’, ‘Going on’, ‘In my lotion’ and ‘Cotton Candy’. A showcase was held on release day at the Ilchi Art Hall in Seoul.

The scent

This record’s scent is soap. The album introduction presents it as a record about the group’s growth — style, confidence and skill, not looks alone — expressed as a clean soap scent. According to the Korea JoongAng Daily, Woni told the showcase that the clean scent of soap stands for the change in me, you and us, and for a message of hope.

Reviews

So Seung-geun, writing for IZM, read the record from its low end. Through the title track and the album cuts ‘Going on’ and ‘Cotton candy’, he wrote, “a thick, clear 16-beat bass, as solid as a pillar, leads the whole song”, and “because of it, RESCENE’s music is weighty and stable even though these are dance songs.” The same review said of the record that “the company and RESCENE embraced both musical completion and public attention, successfully”.

Two English-language desks picked the title track. Billboard placed it among its 25 best K-pop songs of the first half of 2025, where Jeff Benjamin wrote that “RESCENE’s pristine discography is only growing better as the rising girl group mixes their dreamy soundscape with catchy, glitchy hyperpop hooks”, and that “the quintet’s swift rollout of an English version of ‘Glow Up’ further cements RESCENE’s promise as an ascending global K-pop force.” For NME’s 25 best K-pop songs of 2025, Ziwei Puah wrote that RESCENE “have sidestepped that pitfall by carving out a soft, reflective space that’s equal parts breezy, nostalgic, and electrifying”, and that “it all comes together on ‘Glow Up’, a bubbly dance-pop tune that’s contemporary enough for the mainstream, yet unique enough to be recognisably them.”

Among the tracks

So Seung-geun wrote that the title track “projects scat onto the main melody” to bring out the hook and “sprays the brightest, lightest energy on the record”. The same review heard ‘In my lotion’ as Jersey club, ‘Going on’ as a funky dance-pop that restores the style of British girl groups from around the turn of the millennium, and ‘Cotton candy’ as the song that widens their range into R&B with high notes. Of the opener ‘Crash’ he wrote that it sits where the first track of SCENEDROME sat, “slow but weighty”.

The numbers

Sports Kyunghyang, reporting the end of promotions on 6 March 2025, put the record’s first-week sales at 41,314 copies, and ET News reported the same figure the same day; it was the group’s best at the time. The same report said the title track had entered Melon’s HOT 100 (the chart for songs within 30 days of release) at 31st. The official music video for the title track is on the group’s channel.