At the end of each month, I look back at my three favorite title tracks by K-pop artists. I take my own ratings into account, but there’s a bit of wiggle room as certain songs tend to grow or fade.

May 2026 Overall Thoughts

While May wasn’t quite as stuffed with highlights as April, it was still an above-average month as far as K-pop’s 2026 is concerned. I had no problem finding songs to fill my top three and there were quite a few solid runner-ups as well.

May struck a nice balance between veteran comebacks and new voices. My favorite music tended to come from those artists right in the middle, debuting between 2019 and 2024. However, I enjoyed songs from new acts like YUHZ, Heart Of Woman and AND2BLE. And, it’s always nice to hear from nostalgic voices like Taeyang, I.O.I and SeeYa (even if the music isn’t always up to par).

Upbeat pop seemed to be the norm this month, as K-pop slowly transitions from the muted tones of years past to brighter fare. House music is especially popular at the moment, which is unsurprising given it’s such a perennial favorite of the industry. I’m hopeful to hear more dynamic melodies tied to these house songs as so many of them still favor talking over singing. As overused as the genre is, it’s still one of my go-to sounds so I’m not mad at this current slate of trends.

My top three choices of May all come from familiar artists (and were all released in the same week!). Numbers two and three are mainstays of this chart and I’m delighted to welcome back my number one after a couple years away from the top three. Each of these songs proved to be growers for me. J-pop also had plenty to offer this month. I actually had to leave a few songs out of my top three that could have otherwise made it. That’s a far cry from March of this year, when I couldn’t even pick a song to include in my top choices! In fact, I paired two songs by the same artist at number one because they’re both fantastic and quite similar in execution.

My “Ultimate Artist Ranking” page continues to fill up with many new faces added to the pantheon. I still have plenty of heavy hitters waiting for their turn and plan to keep this feature going for the forseeable future. Who do you all want to see next?

Though I didn’t write about it on the blog, I got the chance to attend Close Your Eyes’s Canadian tour this week and really enjoyed their show. The venue was nice and small and they sounded fantastic. I’m looking forward to more K-pop concerts in the coming months and keeping all my fingers crossed that TWS somehow decides to do a North American tour in the near future.

Looking forward to June, I feel optimism about where we might be headed. June is a historically strong month for K-pop as summer songs start to roll out in earnest, and we’ve already got a stacked comeback slate scheduled for the month. Many of these (SHINee, ONF, RIIZE, Xia Junsu, BOYNEXTDOOR) are personal favorites of mine. It could be very competitive. I certainly hope so!

Month Cumulative Rating: 7.5

(compiled by averaging the scores of every K-pop review from this month)