With Their Debut, AND2BLE Wants to Take You Back to the 2010s
Categoria: Musica
AND2BLE (pronounced “And-Double”) is trying to take fans on a blast to the past, back to third-generation K-pop.
Por Billboard | 03/09/2026
There’s a saying: Everything old is new again. Trot, a traditional Korean pop genre, is en vogue. Recently, a fresh new group ushered in the newtro (a clash of “new” and “retro”) renaissance of pristine, vintage pop that made K-pop feel contemporary by subtracting from it, leaning on innocent appeals with less bombast and vocal grandstanding. Like their predecessors, AND2BLE (pronounced “And-Double”) is trying to take fans on a blast to the past, back to third-generation K-pop. For AND2BLE, though, the trip backward is also a way forward. The five members have already lived through one version of themselves: Zhang Hao, Ricky, Kim Gyuvin and Han Yujin debuted in ZEROBASEONE after joining the survival show Boys Planet , while Yoo Seungeon, who finished 16th on the show, went on to debut in EVNNE . When ZEROBASEONE’s project contract concluded, the four YH Entertainment members left the group; Seungeon likewise departed EVNNE. All five have now regrouped under YH as AND2BLE. Their debut, Sequence 01: Curiosity , is a five-track, roughly 14-minute exercise that recreates the style of K-pop’s past. It remembers a time when a K-pop boy group could be expected to sound expensive, vocally athletic, and indulgently overdramatic without neo-futuristic theater. Plus, AND2BLE are flexing their historical know-how, investing heavily in the voice. Seungeon brings clarity and high-register power; Hao supplies a steadier, warmer counterweight. Ricky’s softer, R&B-leaning delivery changes the texture of a song, while Gyuvin and Yujin fill out the middle with smoother, more understated tones. The pleasure is in the handoff. TAEHWAN KIM “Curious,” the title track, makes that nostalgia instantly legible. Its synth-pop and future-house architecture is all propulsion: a thick bass foundation, hard-edged EDM percussion, and an anthemic hook that’s designed for music show stages anchored by the rallying of Seungeon and Hao’s vocal ping-ponging. It is, in other words, unabashedly K-pop in the old sense. The track is also a reclamation of the members’ careers. “Curious” (co-writing participation by Hao and Ricky) confronts the instability of a new beginning rather than retreating from it (“Start anew, with no limits”). Still, the members are hardly new to being watched. They have already passed through the strange acceleration of survival-show K-pop, already inhabited identities that belonged to other groups, already acquired audiences who’ve stayed with built-in barometers of expectations. “Aura” is where the rebirth process promised in “Curious” becomes crystalline. It is less interested in the title track’s muscularity, opening instead into a gauzier pop-R&B landscape of synths and hushed vocals. The song’s central conceit—an attraction born of ineffable personal magnetism—is buoyed by a coyness poignant enough to create negative space. The vocal texture itself is part of the flirtation: “I’ll show you piece by piece, everything /