Monsta X’s Jooheon fails to get into “Rhythm” in his absolute mess of a pre-release

Jooheon of Monsta X will be releasing a mixtape soon, and “Rhythm” is the pre-release track that’s supposed to whet our appetites for what’s to come. It took me a while to get around to reviewing it because … well, it’s not great.

As a fan of some of Jooheon’s past work, I’m a bit confused after listening to “Rhythm”, because I honestly thought it was terrible. Like something Chanyeol would do on ‘Unpretty Rapstar,’ it was just just short of three minutes of struggle rap.

The obvious thing that turned me off immediately was the auto-tuned repetition of “rhythm” and “kill ’em” and whatever other words/phrases were included in that. Amazingly, those weren’t even the worst ones, as at 1:20 they start repeating “what the”, “shut up”, and “moida” (“murder”) over and over again where it crosses over into cringe territory. Rarely do I actually make a physical face of disdain while I’m listening to music or watching a music video, but even I had to give a quick look of “yikes” to it.

Piling on, the distortion used throughout the song was corny, and any time it seemed like he might get into the flow of things a bit, he immediately came out of it to do one of the auto-tuned repetition sections again. The effort was all over the place sonically, yet it never seemed to go anywhere. For something so messy, it was awful repetitive at the same time, which is quite the accomplishment.

Jooheon can do better than “When Keepin’ It Hep-Hap Goes Wrong” “Rhythm”, and I sure as hell hope this isn’t an indication of the path his mixtape is gonna go down, because this is probably gonna be one of the more unappealing hip-hop efforts of the year.