BABYMONSTER CHOOM — Six Members, Four Tracks, and One Question YG Can't Dodge
BABYMONSTER's last mini album, WE GO UP, landed at No. 13 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart in October 2025 and moved over 550,000 copies in its first week. The expectation for CHOOM was more of the same: a short, high-impact YG project built around a single anthem and enough sonic range to give the six-member lineup room to move. Two days after release, the numbers are cooperating - 387,871 first-day physical sales, a new group record. The music is more complicated.
CHOOM is a four-track EP that opens confidently and loses momentum by track three. "Moon," the album opener, is the most sonically interesting thing here. It runs 2 minutes 46 seconds - barely a verse-chorus-verse structure - and drops into a Southern trap-flavored R&B groove that doesn't quite fit the group's established YG swagger but works because of that friction. Asa's rap section carries the track's most assured moment: the kind of clean, unhurried delivery that makes the surrounding production feel larger than it is. "Moon" sounds like something that would have landed differently with three more minutes attached to it. Instead, it exits before it lands anywhere in particular.
The title track is built around a synth riff that arrives in the first four seconds and doesn't stop until the song ends. As a piece of functional dance-floor engineering, "CHOOM (춤)" is exactly what a YG title track needs to be - relentless, physically legible, and proportioned for a stadium. The hook is built around repetition of the word "choom" (Korean for "dance") over a heavy bass drop, and it works the way a crowd call-and-response is supposed to work: you don't need to think about it. What you lose in that trade is any sense that BABYMONSTER is doing something only BABYMONSTER can do. "CHOOM" is their most generically accomplished title track. It's also their least distinctive one.
"I Like It" is where the EP stumbles. A country-pop hybrid that swings between bright post-chorus textures and an acoustic-lite verse structure, it doesn't fail because of the genre blend - it fails because it sounds like the version of the song before anyone decided what it was. The chorus has energy; the verses don't earn it. This is the track critics on Album of the Year have been most unsparing about, and they're right that it drags.
"Locked In" closes on a different register entirely. Sung entirely in English, it's a warm R&B ballad built on soft acoustic guitar and the group's stacked harmonies. After three tracks that prioritize performance over feeling, "Locked In" lands with actual weight. The layered ad-libs on the outro are the most convincing thing BABYMONSTER has put on record since "Batter Up." It closes the EP correctly. The problem is that arriving at "Locked In" requires sitting through "I Like It" first.
The seventh member is absent from all four tracks. Rami has been on a health hiatus since May 2025 and did not participate in CHOOM's recording or production. Her absence doesn't change what the six members deliver - they're technically strong throughout - but it hangs over the EP as an unresolved fact. The album's title is the Korean word for "dance." YG's pre-release materials framed CHOOM as a project about "the world becoming one dance floor." One of the seven people who built this group is sitting this one out for the second consecutive release, and no one is talking about it.
CHOOM is a competent mini album that arrives with more commercial energy than creative ambition. The sales record is real. The question is whether the Billboard figure, due Saturday, confirms that WE GO UP's US momentum has carried forward - or whether the crossover traction proves harder to repeat.
CHOOM is out now on YG Entertainment. The 2026-2027 BABYMONSTER World Tour opens June 26-28 at Jamsil Indoor Stadium in Seoul.
