Join Cherry Bullet on their Love Adventure!
Only four months and a day after their debut with Q&A, which you can read about here, FNC Entertainment’s rookie group Cherry Bullet has levelled up with their second album that promises to take you on a Love Adventure! Sporting the upbeat title track “Really Really” alongside two more singles, this album will make you want to restart and repeat until you can sing every word.
Title Track: “Really Really”
If succeeding at only one thing, Cherry Bullet’s comeback shoots straight through your eyes with varying outfits and picturesque scenery, fitting for the video game that this track invites you to spectate. The cheat code for the adorable aesthetics seems to be the augmented reality, or AR, that features heavily throughout as Cherry Bullet plays through various stages and mini-games in order to successfully beat the game. These include a dance quest, shooting candy-like skulls with arrows, and even a luck-based mission with floating cards! Glimpses of the members “special concepts” are showcased throughout the video, such as when Chaerin uses her “power booster” speciality to help clear a card mission. The end goal of their love adventure seems somewhat unclear, however, as it ends with every member shooting at what turns out to be nothing more than a giant cherry. Nonetheless, the wonderfully bright and fast-paced video ensures that you feel nothing but hope and excitement when the final mission comes to a close!
The title track is the typical summertime bop that you’d expect from a group sporting a cute video-games concept: upbeat and synth-heavy with a hint of EDM. While it lacks the second verse rap that is very typical of mainstream K-Pop at the moment—opting for the kind of talk-singing that one would find in Weki Meki’s new track “Picky Picky” or just about any TWICE song—the track makes up for the lack of conventional formatting with a catchy chorus that is bound to bounce around in your head for days to come. Combining this with the rather restrictive beat, however, does leave the potential for the chorus to become annoying as time passes.
The Album
With only two B-sides to the album, as it was with their debut album Let’s Play Cherry Bullet, the release begins with their title track and swiftly moves on to “Ping Pong” as a slightly more bass-heavy, yet still considerably upbeat track about confessing one’s feelings to a crush. This song contains both the rap and lyrical chorus that the title track lacks, marking it on the recommended list for anyone in love with typical cute concept tracks. Despite being extremely cute, the group's concept of video games is not lost, with a 16-bit-inspired beat and the idea of a “love point” representing someone’s romantic feelings as if they were a stat point in a game, or a requirement to reach the next level—something that this track certainly does!
To call the third and final track of this album different would be a gross understatement. “Ruddy” swaps out the upbeat nature of the first two tracks for a dance-pop vibe with subtle hints of desire that are brought to light by the sirens throughout the song, as if they were warning Cherry Bullet of things to come. Whereas the other tracks are about confessing romantic feelings to someone in an upbeat display of love, this song features the darker side of the love adventure, highlighting the dangerous uncertainty that comes with having a crush and how being essentially powerless against your feelings, yet still willing to admit them, is akin to playing with fire.
To summarize, Love Adventure is an album that brings forward three different ways around crushing and admitting one’s feelings, even if the adventure ends up feeling somewhat incomplete as nothing is explored past the point of confession. In the case that the upbeat title track isn’t able to resonate with the hearts of listeners, both B-sides provide alternatives fitting of recognition as the more conventional “Ping Pong” displays the cuter side of crushing to contrast the darker nature of “Ruddy,” which is comparable to that of a final boss battle. Hopefully, the adventure is continued within their next album, and we’ll see more of what Cherry Bullet has to offer!