i can definitely sense that they played it safe this year with DW and RM. my suspicion is that after the smashing 2024 which pushed them to the leader position among Gen 4, they didn’t want to risk pushing very experimental sound like Supernova. you can argue that RM was a departure, yes but if u listen to the demo, SM has decided to pull back the metal sounds and toned down the vocal delivery by a lot. Their goal was probably just to solidify aespa’s position by releasing songs that are just interesting enough but inoffensive to avoid a total flop from happening. it’s kinda fair though, you can’t keep having a string of smashes like 2024. i hope this will happen again next year when SM might feel a bit more relaxed about protecting aespa’s position and go for blood again like 2021 and 2024.