Next LevelAn aespa single released on 17 May 2021. Idology's Sseodeu and the writers of The Singles Jukebox wrote about the song's story-within-a-story structure.
‘Next Level’ is a single aespa released on 17 May 2021. It came six months after the debut single ‘Black Mamba’ of November 2020, and five months before the first mini-album, Savage.
SM Entertainment’s album introduction calls it a hip-hop dance track that remakes ‘Next Level’, a song from the soundtrack of the film Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. The same text says the lyrics follow the members into KWANGYA in search of whatever broke their SYNK with their ‘ae’ avatars.
The music video went up on the official SMTOWN channel the same day.
Idology (아이돌로지), a Korean webzine covering idol pop, took the song in its monthly singles column. Its writer Sseodeu read the structure as a story within a story: ‘Next Level’, he wrote, is built so that a completely different song is inserted in the middle, with no attempt at all to hide the seam audible between the two. What follows, he added, is that the impossible construction turns out to be rather appealing — the opening beat and rap work as an opening, and the vocal part that bursts out of nowhere, along with a back half that sounds as though Yoo Young-jin had signed it, is no less habit-forming.
The same piece tried to explain the shape from outside the song. Sseodeu suggested reading aespa’s songs less as self-contained singles than as soundtrack cues or musical numbers written for a universe, and said that on that assumption the song’s brazenly disorienting construction becomes reasonably easy to accept. Idology carried the piece again, in excerpt, when it placed the song on its ‘결산 2021 : ②올해의 노래 10선’ list on 30 December that year.
The Singles Jukebox, where a panel of British and American music writers each file a short note on one single, covered the song on 11 June 2021. Jacob Sujin Kuppermann wrote that “it’s ridiculously ambitious for a single even if you aren’t playing into the Sherry-Turkle-Life-On-The-Screen-meets-Code-Lyoko persona work that aespa’s doing in their girl group worldbuilding,” and found that as pure auditory entertainment it is “a wave of hooks that can’t stop itself.”
Juana Giaimo picked out the switch in the middle. “When the beat drops and the song suddenly turns jazzier, their vocals sound so fresh: they are playful, effortlessly going from singing to rapping, with the loose beat making it all really dynamic,” she wrote. On the same page Nortey Dowuona put the arrangement entirely into movement: “The snarling bass and scattered drums circle aespa, the percussion trailing and then chomping but waved away by the bass, which slings in synth horns that bring in plush JJTL keyboards, then sweep in aespa.” Wayne Weizhen Zhang called the song “ruckus, extra, Bruno Mars-level-vibes silliness that unfurls with the subtlety of a stick of rainbow dynamite exploding.”
Billboard placed the song on ‘25 Best K-Pop Songs of 2021: Critics’ Picks’ on 17 December 2021. The entry is signed with the initials ‘S.B.’ and the page gives no key to them. It reads: “aespa hit the ground running after releasing ‘Black Mamba,’ but came back harder — and stronger — in 2021 with ‘Next Level.’” The same note says the four members “marry futuristic pop and hip-hop on the track and later splice it in two with a jazzy mid-song switch up.”
Idology placed the song on its own songs-of-the-year list the same month. Both lists are drawn from that year’s releases and picked by the outlet’s writers.
Claims in this story link to official or primary sources.
aespa played Lollapalooza in Chicago for the first time on 2 August 2026, with a set of 14 songs. Two days later the music video for 'Switchblade', a B-side from the second full-length album, was released. Here are the stage and the video together.
