Crank the Volume “LOUDER” for CRAVITY’s Newest EP: sonorous
Photo Courtesy of STARSHIP ENTERTAINMENT
Sound waves, Greek mythos, electronic dance pop: CRAVITY’s got it all. STARSHIP ENTERTAINMENT’s nine-member boy-group, now in their sixth year, returned September 30 with sonorous. The seven-track EP, fronted by the title track “LOUDER,” spans electronic dance pop, conceptual hip-hop, and synth-forward rock under a singular fundamental concept: the ethos of music. Together, CRAVITY sets out to show that many waves, be they audible, ultrasonic, or born of guitar strings, all converge into a single, powerful resonance. sonorous, acting as that convergence, offers a conceptual power piece — dark, dramatic, and layered.
Pairing the music with strong story-forward visuals and a series of concept films, the EP tells the story of the nine muses (one per member) finding a common language in music: “We could see that the bends within me were no different from the waves within you.”
TRACKLIST
“Pulse”
“LOUDER”
“Lucky Charm”
“LOVE ME”
“Seize the Night”
“Fantasy”
“Odd One Out”
Despite its name, “LOUDER” does not deliver a fistful of volume to one’s eardrum. Rather, the track, an electropop feast, accelerates, climbing ever louder with each passing beat. Featuring a breakneck rap-verse bridge and belty ad-libs, “LOUDER” energizes its own pace. Flickering crests and troughs like a true sound wave, the track explodes into its final chorus. It’s catchy, primed for dancing, and full to the brim with sound: everything a K-Pop electronic song sets out to become. The music video features the members as the nine muses of Greek mythology, each bound by rope, drawn to each other across time and space, and the choreography aligns in theme, arms whirling in one wavelength, spins, heartbeats, and convergence.
Opener “Pulse” blends concept with sound in what is sonorous’s most literal track, while also being the most experimental. The song throws in this stripped-back, anti-drop refrain: “pulse, pulse, pulse,” layering a heartbeat pulsing across the track. On the first drop, it smacks you in the face with its audacity, plummeting right out of its lilting, atmospheric build-up. It’s unforgiving. And yet, the surrounding verses embrace the weirdness in their own construction, cutting in soft piano lines seemingly out of the blue and layering in gentle harmonies and bright, running adlibs. Somehow, “Pulse” builds, greater than the sum of its parts, pulsing its way into one resonance. While it’s hard to call the experience easy-listening, it’s certainly high-concept, its composition synthesizing sonorous’s theme with its construction. In this way, “Pulse” is illogically compelling—the interplay between sound and the emptiness thereof.
“Lucky Charm” oozes swag. Brash confidence pairs with a clever ballpark organ-esque 8-bit instrumental while CRAVITY boasts, “I’ve got that lucky charm from my head to toe.” Cheeky is perhaps the most apt descriptor for the song: bells, whistles, hitting the jackpot start to finish. Fast, fresh, feeling lucky, it’s a song primed to level up with each listen.
With production by member Serim, “LOVE ME” delivers retro-synths alongside anthemic pop-rock: a CRAVITY staple. The song is not formulaic; one thing about CRAVITY, the verses are going to build. Ad-libs grow and layer over synths until the final chorus skips a beat into its last plea: “you should love me.” One of the most solidly built tracks on the album, “LOVE ME” keeps its pace, desperate, pleading, ever-climbing.
With future-synths, warped vocals, and a sharp, snare-forward beat, “Seize the Night” fits right at home in some kind of cyberpunk galactic car-chase scene, lights blurring by, vocals leaving a trail of exhaust behind them. “I chase the starlight in the sky,” the members avow. Arpeggiating synths shimmer across the piece in a song that feels right at home in an OST, any extended vocal line underpinned with quickened chanting beneath it that leaves the tempo breathless.
“Fantasy,” featuring production work by Woobin, is anything but hesitant, punching the gas from the first measure, skyrocketing the EP’s median BPM with ease. “Fantasy” feels like a more mature take on CRAVITY’s early era racing-concept, “Accelerate, let’s drive!”.
Closer “Odd One Out” boasts spectacle and compositional cleverness, a true odd one out for all it brings to the table, toying with tempo, volume, and flow. With composition credits from Taeyoung and lyrics from both Taeyoung and Allen, “Odd One Out,” like its opening counterpart “Pulse,” is so compositionally steeped in the EP’s concept that it's shocking.
The song is gritty and all dramatic edge, never doing what you expect, teasing a climactic high note before dropping out with a plain, antithetical: “I feel the high.”
Then, everything cuts back in for the final chorus, the promised high note now relegated to a distant ad-lib over a rich chorus (the real payoff). The song delights in weaving its lyrics with its composition: the beat stops when asked, the refrain “odd one out” is just that, a high choral cut off that comes out of nowhere, and “Odd One Out” is laden in that eponymous interlude, “sonorous, sonorous, sonorous.” But, by the end, each piece is woven together until nothing is odd, nor left out. The song is a masterclass in building tempo, cresting its many waves to resonance.
In this way, sonorous offers a self-determined solution to the false dichotomy between the demands of K-Pop and the call of musicality. CRAVITY, in their fourth release since their concept-heavy 2025 rebrand, continues in their artistic endeavors to weave themselves, and their sound, around a message of self-actualization, unity, and artistry. This time, it’s via an EP that clings to the universality of music, the power of a sound wave. From instrumentals, to vocals, loud to “LOUDER,” sonorous follows its own ebbs and flows, never settling for a status quo.