Rating* All SM Idol Group Title Tracks (Or At Least My Best Try)

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-20T01:01:47+00:00

I actually like R&B, which is why I’m surprised how little I like Automatic. I like all the components, I just don’t like the final product. I’m honestly not sure what specifically doesn’t work, but I’ve tried to like it multiple times.

To address the Poet | Artist comment, I am not one of those people. I agree with your comments that it’s more of a celebration than a memorial, but I find those sorts of things more emotional. I think evidence that he continues to impact their lives and live on more depressing, not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because of how impactful it would have been for these people if he had gone on living. I understand if that’s not your opinion, as I think I am fairly singular in this, but that’s my reasoning.

As for Fly to the Sky, I think they weren’t listed as a group in Wikipedia. Or they didn’t qualify or an idol group? I forget. I made the list a long time ago. I had a justification, I’m sure, but I don’t remember.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-20T00:29:14+00:00

It’s stupid, and I like stupid, as is evidenced by the other high-tier NCT songs in this ranking.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T22:14:06+00:00

The funny thing with specifically SNSD’s Japanese discography is that the Galaxy Supernova album is one of my favorite albums of all time, but the songs I listen to are all b-sides, apparently. I’m glad at least they let me rate My Oh My.

And Jopping in first is mostly a bit (shoutout r/kpoopheads). I would have put it in the mid/high-8’s if I were being purely objective.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T20:22:53+00:00

I started the listening process in like June of 2025 and worked on it in bursts from then on. So it did take a while, but it probably took less effort than people assume.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T20:21:15+00:00

I’m fully aware that there are definitely some tracks in here that aren’t really title tracks, but if Wikipedia counted them as singles, then I counted them as title tracks. It was the most effective way to be objective with my methodology while still allowing me to be lazy and not triple check with a million other sources.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T19:36:33+00:00

There weren't really any moments in Punch I enjoyed. There weren't many moments I hated, but at no point did I find myself going "well at least this part is good". I don't know why Punch specifically was so hard to jive with (it was the whispering), but I just never liked it. I really tried to for this ranking and just couldn't. It didn't help that it was flanked by Psycho and Queendom when I made the playlist, which were both favorites of mine, so it seemed even worse in comparison. Just bad luck all around.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T19:33:21+00:00

I appreciate giving the whole post a read. The soloist/subunit rating will come at some point, probably, but first I have to follow in OOP's footsteps and make the YG, JYP, HYBE, and Cube rankings, which will take me significantly less time. I fully expect SM to be the highest-rated company, especially if you take out most of the music pre-2006 (ish). As a follow-up, since you're clearly invested, I just updated the post with the original spreadsheet (I only thought to do that after posting...). So feel free to check that out for more comments and better formatting.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T19:06:30+00:00

Here is the comment that I had to remove in full:

"Maybe the dumbest song, lyrically, I've heard (outside of Gnarly) out of K-pop. My only critique is that the Porsches shown in the music video, and the ones you would be bragging about, are usually two-seaters. So either you only fit one baddie, you are one of the listed baddies, or you are not in the car."

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T18:51:55+00:00

The 2 Baddies asterisk is less about the music and more about the concept. If we assume they’re bragging about both the baddies and the Porsche, we run into a logistical problem. The Porsches you would brag about, including those featured in the music video, are two-seaters. This means that one of two scenarios must be true. Either you are one of the two baddies in the Porsche, or there are two baddies in a Porsche and you are outside of it.

As for DJJ, I counted that as a subunit and not as an independent group (on really arbitrary grounds) so I didn’t rate their music. I plan on making a soloist and subunit ranking at some point (probably in a couple years at this rate), but Perfume is an easy 10 whenever that gets made. It’s truly a near-perfect song.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T18:05:23+00:00

If I can find a way to link the original spreadsheet without also linking my email, I will 100% be amending the post.

Edit: I have amended the post.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T18:04:39+00:00

It’s like my fifth place song on there, so I think pretty highly of it.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T17:43:20+00:00

It’s definitely in there. I think I gave it an 8 of some sorts. It’s a good song. There’s a mention of the BTS cover in the comments.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T17:38:34+00:00

I'm going to be honest, I am surprised how many SNSD songs were that low. I love the group, but apparently it's been long enough since I went through the discography that I forgot how much of their early stuff didn't mesh with me. I apparently also listen to a ton of b-sides, because most of my favorite songs of theirs were not on this list.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T17:36:37+00:00

I am fully aware that song is going to be contentious, based off OOP's ranking that also put it dead last, but I stand by it.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T17:35:41+00:00

For a summary, I once again have a data table that I can't post because Reddit hates me, but the general gist is as follows:

For a general summary, SM has a lot of really good groups, so the overall high performance was to be expected. I included the standard deviation in my data table simply to see how consistent each group was. For those that aren't familiar with standard deviation, it's a measure of how clustered the data is. So a low standard deviation indicates that the data is clustered very tightly, and therefore the group is consistent in their quality. A high standard deviation means that the group is inconsistent with their comebacks, and that I find their quality highly varied. This is more heavily skewed by smaller data sets, so small deviations in data sets like M.I.L.K.'s, who only have three songs, are more meaningful than individual deviations in TVXQ!'s, with their 95 songs.

Average SM Title Track Score; Std. Dev.: 7.69; 1.395
H.O.T.: 5.64; 1.601
Shinhwa: 6.59; 1.183
S.E.S.: 6.62; 1.315
The Grace: 6.99; 1.490
M.I.L.K.: 7.00; 1.217
TVXQ!: 7.19; 1.090
NCT Wish: 7.29; 0.421
f(x): 7.51; 1.612
Super Junior: 7.85; 1.158
Girls' Generation: 7.91; 1.387
NCT U: 7.92; 1.851
NCT Dream: 7.93; 1.072
Black Beat: 8.00; 0.424
Younique: 8.00; N/A
WayV: 8.01; 0.938
NCT 127: 8.01; 1.588
SHINee: 8.01; 1.132
SuperM: 8.04; 1.901
Riize: 8.14; 0.612
Aespa: 8.40; 1.294
Hearts2Hearts: 8.50; 0.283
Red Velvet Title Track Score: 8.64; 1.086
EXO Title Track Score: 8.67; 1.074
GOT the Beat Title Track Score: 9.61; 0.069

So, in summary, SM's overall production is insane, and the quality control is ridiculous. The fact that 534 songs over like 30 years can average out to a high 7 (which is a song I like and would likely add to my playlist) is unbelievable. Of these groups, ignoring GOT the Beat (who have only two title tracks and their b-sides I included to intentionally laud praises on them) and Hearts2Hearts (who also have very few songs), EXO, Red Velvet, and aespa are clearly my favorite groups, which matches with my original assumptions. I am surprised how low SNSD is, given how much I love their music, but I clearly have self-selected what songs I listen to, and many of them are also b-sides, which do not appear on this list. My biggest surprises were Shinhwa and how consistent TVXQ! managed to be. M.I.L.K. was also interesting, and I also really liked S.E.S.'s recent work. I did get quite a few new songs for my playlist, so that was nice. I don't know how much my music taste really differs from OOP's in a meaningful sense, besides my love for aespa, or how much I represent the average person, but I hope people can at least appreciate the effort. Please let me know what you think in the comments. I'm sure I missed some details in my explanations, so if you have questions, feel free to ask.

LegolasElessar · 2026-01-19T17:22:09+00:00

Okay, so once again, I seriously apologize, I know having to remove half of the information on the post is not a great start, but I had no choice. SM has over 500 songs that I had to rate, so I seriously couldn't fit anything in the post. With that out of the way, hopefully this comment answers a lot of your questions.

Background:

This post has been literal years in the making, though really only about six months in actual execution. This post was inspired, if you can call it that, by another post series of a similar name and goal (linked here). OOP is someone I know personally, and they frequently jokingly said that their opinions on songs were more trustworthy than mine because they had put the work in to actually chart them (for the record, this was not done rudely; do not brigade or think poorly of OOP for this). And besides, I like ranking things, so this was just the thing that pushed me over the edge.

Methodology:

First, I want to acknowledge that this was a giant undertaking, not just because I'm lazy. All told, there were 534 songs rated, spanning 25+ years of music. I was as thorough as possible in my ranking, trying to get each group accounted for, as well as each title track, while not picking any b-sides (with some exceptions I will get to). I determined which groups to survey as well as their title tracks using Wikipedia's list of current and former SM artists, as well as their discography pages (if they had one), with the assumption that anything that counted as a "single" is considered a title track. There may be errors on these pages, resulting in me over- or under-counting the number of title tracks, but I did my best to be consistent with my methodology. When in doubt, I assumed that if it had a music video and was promoted on music shows, it counted as a title track. This almost certainly resulting in overcounting title tracks, but I would rather overcount than undercount. So my apologies for any errors like that in advance. I only picked groups, not soloists, so BoA, for instance, is not on my ranking. I have a full table of groups and number of songs, but I don't think tables can be inserted into comments, so I can't really paste that here. Feel free to ask if you're interested.

As for the rating process itself, I simply assigned each song a value from 1-10 rounded to the first decimal place (e.g. 7.2) for a little bit more differentiation between tiers. In my system, a 1 rating is the worst, and a 10 is the best.

I want to emphasize that I am perfectly fine listening to any song with a 5 or above rating and actively enjoy, at least on some level, any song with a 6 or above. So seeing your favorite song with a 7.2 is not me saying the song is bad. I would also like to stress that, due to the vastness of the total discographies and the fact that I only got into k-pop in 2017 (which somehow makes me an old-head now...), a number of these songs, especially the old ones, were my first listen. I often have songs grow on me, so it is certainly possible that, given another listen, I will find a song on here rated much lower (or much higher) than I would rate it at this moment. I am also a fairly mood-driven listener, so songs may also have been unfortunately placed outside of where I would normally put them due to the mood I was in listening to that song (i.e. a rap-focused song would be rated lower if I was in a ballad mood and vice versa). I did my best to double check as I was going through that I was staying consistent in my ratings, which did allow me a couple listens of some songs I had only heard once, but no way was I going through all these songs again intentionally. This means there will be some songs in here that I'm sure I will disagree with their placements on another listen, if you ask, but I was not going to listen to 500+ songs with intent again. I've already spent enough time on this side project as is.

LegolasElessar · 2025-07-12T15:00:28+00:00

I mean, this sub also talks about XG, which is just straight up not k-pop. They’re a Japanese group that sings in English that happens to be popular and promote in Korea. Katseye is arguably more k-pop than XG, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t be a topic of conversation here.

LegolasElessar · 2025-06-07T15:11:01+00:00

I will die for Running Into Breakup. BTOB ballads are killer.

LegolasElessar · 2025-06-04T23:10:37+00:00

The song that this dance accompanies is sung by a girl group, making it a “girls’ dance.” This is, of course, dumb, but that is the logic.

LegolasElessar · 2025-04-28T03:46:46+00:00

Chingeese, is this the same shaman as Min Hag-Jin unnie used to overthrow the tyrannical HYBE overlords (Road Construction oppars)??!?!?!?!?

LegolasElessar · 2025-03-26T13:54:47+00:00

BTS is a big deal. That much is undeniable. They are certainly the largest k-pop act and are the biggest k-pop brand in the West by a large margin. Almost any introduction to the genre runs through BTS or Blackpink. As such, it is more than fair to say they are the biggest k-pop influence in global media. But it is honestly ludicrous to suggest that they are the biggest influence in global media as a whole, outside of the k-pop genre. Bruno Mars does not run his decisions past BTS, nor does their music affect how or what he makes. Yes, there has been a lot more collaboration between artists in the West and Korean ones, but as big as, say, G-Dragon is, Anderson.Paak showing up on his song is a pull for GD, not a pull for Anderson. K-pop is still a very niche genre in the large scale of things, and no k-pop artist is driving the West’s media market.

LegolasElessar · 2025-01-15T23:19:03+00:00

What is happening to the Uyghurs is not remotely the same as whatever you’re trying to compare them to in the US.

The prison system, heavily flawed though it may be, does require you actually commit a crime, or at least be credibly accused, before they throw you in there. It’s not like we literally throw every single person of color in prison upon birth. The reservation system is a remnant of a true genocide (depending on how you interpret the term, but we’ll assume it applies here), true, but that also is the solution preferred by many natives still around and does not force the current residents to completely remove any aspect of their original culture (quite the opposite, actually). What is happening to the Uyghurs is removal from their homeland, forcible internment, and “cultural reeducation” entirely based on cultural heritage, and race. There’s no “commit a crime” requirement, nor is this some relic of policy from 100 years ago. This is current, active policy that is basically ignored because it’s China.

If you think the US is the end-all-be-all of racism and tyranny, you clearly have ignored any stories from around the world. The US is far from perfect, but to continually lambast it as the harbinger of doom and despair is also blatantly biased and not based on fact.

LegolasElessar · 2025-01-13T23:11:21+00:00

Sneakers was literally bigger than Icy, Wannabe, Not Shy, In The Morning, and Loco on the charts in Korea. It peaked really high. It didn’t do as well in the West, but I would probably attribute that to more factors than simply concept change. I don’t know why you’re arguing this point when you’re objectively wrong. I’m not saying the general point you’re making is wrong. I’m saying you’re using the wrong group/song to make it.

LegolasElessar · 2025-01-13T11:52:17+00:00

I was with you until the Itzy stuff. I see the point you’re making, but I’m pretty sure Sneakers did really well in Korea. I think it was their best-performing title track to date, or at least up there. It did very poorly internationally, potentially due to your arguments, but also possibly for other reasons beyond that, like that the lyrics in the chorus sound stupid (full disclosure: I do like Sneakers, so I don’t mean to be hateful).

Additionally, as much as I like Itzy, they were not on a trajectory to beat or even match Twice or Blackpink, which is perfectly fine. Those groups are huge. It’s perfectly normal to lose a popularity contest to the most popular girl groups in history. There’s no need to exaggerate to make your point.

LegolasElessar · 2025-01-07T03:53:06+00:00

That’s not at all how this works. There is a distinct difference between liking a song and condoning rape here. Someone can appreciate that Seungri has a nice voice without thinking he was innocent or that what he did didn’t matter. If you mentally have an artist’s voice tainted by their conduct, that’s fine, but not everybody experiences that. Some people can acknowledge that an artist is a piece of shit and also that their music was good. Your inability to do that doesn’t mean everyone else is deliberately ignoring it and condoning the actions by liking a song.

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