LOSER

The song

‘LOSER’ is one of the two songs on M, the single BIGBANG released on 1 May 2015. It runs three minutes and thirty-nine seconds, and the Bugs (벅스) album page marks both songs on the single as title tracks. The music video went up on the group’s official channel the day before release, on 30 April.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction announced the single as the first of four: M, A, D and E, one a month, collected into a full-length album that September. The same text calls it the group’s first release as five in 1,157 days, since ALIVE in 2012, and describes the monthly schedule as a return, nine years on, to the way the group put out singles when it debuted.

Reviews

IZM’s Jeon Min-seok took the song in the magazine’s single review for May 2015. He opens on the singing, which he calls poised in the members’ harmony, and writes of the words: “Lyrics that are not about love or a night out land on the ear too. An interesting choice from the top of the pile.” What the song leaves behind, he writes, is “frustration and listlessness and defeatism, and at the end of them only a faint hope.”

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the single on 16 May 2015 in the column it gives to the releases of the first ten days of each month. 맛있는 파히타 wrote: “If you asked me what BIGBANG’s greatest strength is, I would answer lyricism.” He placed the song in a line running through ‘Lies’, ‘Haru Haru’ and ‘MONSTER’. MRJ opened on the same contradiction the song is built from: “‘Loser’ is full of contrasting themes.” At its middle, he wrote, “the bridge lets you glimpse hope in a musical way. The chord progression sets up an atmosphere as though it were saying, everything is going to be all right.” His note ends: “A remarkably interesting, well-balanced song in which these contrasting elements are cleverly combined.”

음악취향Y (Eumak Chwihyang Y), a Korean music webzine, ran the song on 11 May 2015 in the forty-second instalment of its Single-Out column, where six writers each file a note. Kim Seong-hwan wrote about the arrangement: “The arrangement, too, cuts back the electronics and concentrates on the rhythm and groove the guitar and drum sessions make, and that lifted the song’s appeal.” His note closes: “A solid pop single that does its job as the opening of a comeback that will run to four parts.” Kim Jeong-won set the single’s two songs side by side: “If ‘BAE BAE’ is the song that proves BIGBANG can go on surviving by putting forward what is theirs alone, then ‘Loser’ is a well-made number that tells you once more what it is that has kept BIGBANG going.” Jeong Byeong-uk wrote that the song’s second-person address and self-critical words choose a vocabulary that is direct without being excessive.

Billboard put the song at the top of its twenty best K-pop songs of 2015, published on 30 December that year. Jeff Benjamin wrote that it took what had already been heard in songs such as ‘Bad Boy’, ‘Lies’ and ‘Blue’ and stripped the trendy elements away for a straight, acoustic-leaning shape, and that “‘Loser’ proved that a subtle take on all the things that make a group unique can speak so much louder.”

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number one on its Digital Chart for week 18 of 2015 (26 April to 2 May), the week of release. It held number one through weeks 19 and 20, stood at number four in weeks 21 and 22, and was at number nine in week 23, the week the next single A arrived. On the same chart’s annual table for 2015 it finished second, with ‘BAE BAE’ from the same single fourth and ‘BANG BANG BANG’, out a month later, first.