Midas Touch

The record

Midas Touch is the first single album of KISS OF LIFE, released on 3 April 2024 with two songs, the title track ‘Midas Touch’ and ‘Nothing’. It came five months after the second mini album Born to be XX. S2 Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs gives the record’s subject as love, and says it carries the message that whether what is loved is oneself, another person or life itself, one should love freely and truthfully without fear of how it looks to others. The same text says the title track, whose plain sound recalls the mainstream music of the 2000s, and the lyrical R&B track ‘Nothing’ are joined by that one subject: the first is about the moment love begins at a touch, the second about the moment the feeling ends.

Reviews

IZM’s So Seung-geun began his single review of April 2024 with where the group’s clock is set. He wrote that “KISS OF LIFE’s songs face the 1990s and the 2000s”, and that the four of them “have breathed a rhythm of their own into the currents of rap and new jack swing, G-funk, the idol music released around the turn of the millennium, hip-hop soul and neo soul”. Of the title track he wrote that “this song, full of the scent of 1990s new jack swing, has the easiest and clearest melody of anything KISS OF LIFE have released so far”, and that “Belle and Haneul’s high pitch, together with the whistle sound used on 1970s disco records and the early-1990s new-jack-swing drums that are hard to hear in a K-pop girl group song, lift the old feeling”. He closed by calling it “a keenly made song from a KISS OF LIFE not yet a year past their debut”.

NME’s Tanu I. Raj read the release as a pair of songs in a track review of 11 April 2024. She wrote that “drawing on early-aughts pop and R&B, ‘Midas Touch’ focuses on the swooping thrill of an early love, where a shiny sparkly toy takes up all the attention”, and that “the group complement this with a definitively nostalgic pop style reminiscent of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera circa late-’90s and early-2000s”. She added that “raspy, coy intonations layer smoothly over synthesisers and harmonies to deliver a mature, polished sound”, and wrote that “KISS OF LIFE emerges as an act who are keenly aware of their own vision and direction”.

Among the tracks

Two months later NME’s half-year list, ‘The 15 best K-pop songs of 2024 – so far’, picked not the title track but the B-side. Puah Ziwei wrote that “while the Britney Spears-esque single ‘Midas Touch’ is pop gold, the quartet give ’90s R&B girl groups more than a run for their money on the exquisite B-side, ‘Nothing’”, and that the group “turn this bittersweet break-up song into a robust self-empowerment anthem”. Raj wrote of the same song that “on ‘Nothing’, the group adopt a mellower approach as they mull over the futility of putting effort into someone who clearly does not reciprocate their feelings”.

After it

Raj dated this single to just after the group’s Rookie of the Year win at that year’s Korean Music Awards. Idology (아이돌로지) picked the song’s music video in its 2024 music-video selection the following February, where Squip wrote: “Arachne, Hera, Aphrodite, Medusa. The visualisation that matched each member to a woman of Greek myth was excellent.” The digital single Sticky followed that July, and the third mini album Lose Yourself in October.