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.

June 2026 Overall Thoughts

This month felt like it was divided in half, with most of the best releases scheduled during the first half. I wonder if this is due to the World Cup and possible pre-emptions of music shows. Whatever the case, it feels like we’ve entered into a real lull right as we should be hearing a bunch of early-summer highlights.

For me, June was much more about albums than title tracks. I really enjoyed mini albums from SHINee, RIIZE and Hearts2Hearts this month. Come to think of it, those are all SM groups! I guess the agency ruled June (even if they couldn’t always pick the best songs to promote as titles). In fact, if certain songs would have received music videos, my top three of June would look very different. (It would easily include TWS’s Dream With Us and RIIZE’s Soar, to be exact.)

However, rules are rules and to be eligible for my top three picks a song must have a music video and/or be widely promoted. This leaves me with an insanely easy choice for my number one and less extraordinary tracks for the runners up.

June has historically been a very strong month for title tracks, but this year’s didn’t live up to recent history. I’d say this was the weakest June since 2022 even if it kicked off with an instant classic hit at the top of the month. Too many songs continued to rely on some of year’s worst trends, including truly awful work from LE SSERAFIM+ILLIT+Katseye, VVS, ATEEZ, Evan and even (sadly) AHOF. These songs, along with a veritable fleet of 6 and 7 rated releases, dragged down June’s rating. I can’t remember ever writing as many harsh reviews as I have this year and a good handful of those came from the past few weeks.

I typically love summer in K-pop, so I still have hope that this season will give us some big hits. The first few weeks of July feel quite barren (due to the World Cup, still?), which is frustrating. AHOF have a redemption arc on their hands and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pull that off. There are a couple of very nugu debuts that could be good as well (but probably won’t be). A promised summer comeback from fromis_9 should also be worth looking forward to. Apart from that, nothing about July’s announced releases has me super excited. I hope that changes soon because 2026 is on track to be one of the industry’s most underwhelming years.

On another note, we’re already halfway through 2026, so I’ll be back tomorrow with my top K-pop songs of the year so far. Then, I’ll drop my favorite albums of the year a day later. Stay tuned!

Month Cumulative Rating: 7.4

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