Lose Yourself

The record

Lose Yourself is the third mini album of KISS OF LIFE, released on 15 October 2024 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘Get Loud’, and the B-side ‘R.E.M’ had been put out ten days earlier with a video of its own. S2 Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs says the keyword of freedom the group had carried since the debut moves here to immersion, and that the title track and the pre-release are joined by that keyword while speaking of the real and the dreamt from opposite directions. The same text describes ‘Get Loud’ as the story of people chasing a dream inside their ordinary lives and ‘R.E.M’ as the story of people who turn towards a dream because they would rather not face what is real, and says the person in the two songs is the same. It also says the seven tracks were spread wide across genre, from groove-led R&B through hip-hop to EDM dance pop.

Reviews

IZM’s Kim Tae-hoon took the pre-release ‘R.E.M’ as a single review in October 2024. He opened by calling it “a mid-tempo R&B track that suits the feel of autumn well”, and wrote that “the orthodox, weighty beat draws out the nostalgia of 2000s R&B for all it is worth, and the members’ vocals, in harmony with one another, add to a warm and polished mood”. He noted that the parts are shared out evenly so that each of the four shows her own strength, and wrote that “the harmony, in which each of their characters is blended evenly, becomes good grounds for the solid ability of KISS OF LIFE itself”. The same piece calls the song “the most comfortable and settled listen they have offered yet”, and sets down an expectation for the album to come.

The B-side ‘Igloo’ was picked out on its own in NME’s year-end list two months later. Carmen Chin placed it 18th in ‘The 25 best K-pop songs of 2024’, writing that “employing slick, minimalist production that embodies effortless confidence, the quartet take a brazen but fruitful gamble by deviating from their usual R&B-pop inclinations”. She wrote that the song is “proof of the band’s versatility and eagerness to experiment beyond their comfort zone”, and that “amid a K-pop canon lousy with attempts at Y2K, KISS OF LIFE have emerged as one of the few acts with a rooted identity and the ability to take from the past and make it their own”.

After it

KISS OF LIFE went out on their first world tour after this record, and marked it the following May with the special digital single KISS ROAD; the fourth mini album 224 followed in June. The release before it was the digital single Sticky, out that July.