SM Entertainment rarely does nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. So when G-Dragon appeared on ‘WDA (Whole Different Animal),’ the opening track from aespa’s second full-length album Lemonade, it immediately felt less like a surprise cameo and more like a statement of intent.
Not because aespa are suddenly struggling. They’re not. Few groups in K-pop have had a run as dominant as the one they managed through 2024, when ‘Supernova,’ ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Whiplash’ pushed the quartet into a level of ubiquity that even SM’s biggest acts rarely sustain for long. But Lemonade arrives carrying a different kind of pressure: the challenge of following an era that already felt definitive.
That tension runs throughout the album. Sometimes it sharpens aespa’s instincts. Other times, it exposes how difficult it is to evolve a group whose identity became so tightly associated with hyper-stylised futurism and metallic intensity.
The clearest success is still ‘WDA.’ Built around bruising synth bass and a leaner hip-hop structure, the track gives aespa something they occasionally lose elsewhere on the album: momentum. G-Dragon’s feature works largely because he doesn’t overpower the group. Instead, his presence stabilises the track’s chaos, giving Ningning and Karina space to sound bigger rather than busier. It’s one of the few moments on Lemonade where aespa stop sounding like they’re reacting to expectations and start sounding genuinely dangerous again.
That harder edge continues on ‘Switchblade,’ a sharp EDM cut that feels much closer to the group’s natural center of gravity than some of the album’s softer detours. Likewise, ‘Can’t Help Myself’ benefits from its rock-influenced production, letting the members lean into vocal textures that SM often buries beneath maximalist production choices. There’s a confidence in these songs that recalls why aespa became so compelling in the first place: they sound best when the music feels slightly excessive.
The title track, meanwhile, takes a noticeably different route. ‘Lemonade’ trades the colder aesthetic of the Armageddon era for something brighter and more playful, echoing the approachable energy of 2023’s ‘Spicy.’ The hook is undeniably catchy, and the “make it lemonade” refrain is engineered with enough precision to live on TikTok for months. But the song also feels strangely familiar, pulling from EDM structures SM has already revisited multiple times over the last few years.
That’s where the album occasionally loses focus. Lemonade is strongest when it commits fully to either aggression or weirdness. Tracks like ‘Camouflage’ hover awkwardly between hyperpop and dream-pop without landing decisively in either space, while ‘Roll’ — with its nursery-rhyme interpolation — feels more curious than convincing. Neither song is disastrous, but both interrupt the album’s pacing at the exact moment it should be accelerating.
What keeps Lemonade from collapsing under that inconsistency is aespa themselves. Even on weaker material, the group’s chemistry remains unusually sharp. Winter and Ningning continue to carry enormous vocal weight, while Giselle sounds more relaxed and confident than she did during earlier releases. Karina, meanwhile, has developed into the kind of performer who can sell a song through sheer force of presence, even when the production underneath her starts to thin out.
The album’s recurring message — turning pressure into possibility — makes sense for where aespa are right now. After the scale of Supernova and Armageddon, a slightly messier, transitional record was probably inevitable. Lemonade doesn’t fully reinvent the group, and it doesn’t always know which version of aespa it wants to prioritise. But it does confirm something more important: even when the experimentation only half-works, aespa remain far more interesting when they push too far than when they play it safe.
And for a group already operating at this level of visibility, that’s probably the better problem to have.
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