Whiplashaespa's fifth mini-album, out on 21 October 2024 with six tracks. IZM and Idology both wrote about how the title track's rhythm is built.
Whiplash is aespa’s fifth mini-album, released on 21 October 2024 with six tracks and ‘Whiplash’ as its title track. It arrived five months after the group’s first full-length album, Armageddon, in May of the same year.
SM Entertainment’s album introduction describes the title track as a dance number led by a house beat and a fast-moving bass. The same text says the six songs run across hip-hop dance, R&B and rock-based pop.
The music video went up on the official SMTOWN channel the same day.
Park Seung-min reviewed the record for the Korean music webzine IZM on 29 December 2024. He read the group as holding to its existing grammar while smoothing out the bumps, and wrote that Whiplash is full of the thrilling metallic flavour that has become their signature, with the iron content raised further.
The same review located the title track’s method in its rhythm. Where the two hits before it had packed as many devices as possible into a short running time, he wrote, ‘Whiplash’ takes a comparatively refined approach, and the secret to fusing techno and house so plainly lies in the rhythm: a four-four pulse laid down broadly underneath, then synth melody and bass texture emphasised in turn as each part comes round, joining the two elements smoothly. He summed the record up as a work whose value is in keeping the group continuous and settling its identity.
Idology (아이돌로지), the Korean idol-pop webzine, placed the song on ‘결산 2024 : ②올해의 노래 16선’ on 27 February 2025, a list voted on by eleven of its current and former writers and six guest jurors. Cho Eun-jae, who wrote the entry, said the group had added concentration and density to the metal-tasting sound it has held since debut and arrived at an extreme of it. The wild bass riff running under the whole song, he wrote, holds the tension from start to finish, and over a hi-hat that jabs at the ear the group’s vocals come down in stilettos.
In the tracklist printed with the review, IZM marked two songs as recommended: ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Kill it’. Of the second, Park Seung-min wrote that the trap beat cast by Imlay, the Korean DJ who has produced bass music, once again takes in the spectrum the group had spread out on ‘Savage’. The same piece describes ‘Flights, not feelings’ as the song that finds its balance by laying a warm melody over the force of its opening.
Idology also placed the song’s music video on ‘결산 2024 : ④뮤직비디오 Pick!’ on 28 February 2025, a page where three of its writers pick the year’s videos and attach a one-line note. Mano called it maximalism realised through a minimal mise-en-scène, and Sskwib wrote that it may have been the video of 2024 in which director and artist fitted together most perfectly.
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.
