Fire's Chill Pick - July 2025

 Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Don’t want you, need you, yeah, I need you to read this piece. Welcome to Fire's Flaming Hot Takes, where we got a new Chill Pick, this could be everything that, that you love, sounds so good. Every spin makes me want more yeah-okay I wanna die at that intro. Anyways, what’s this month’s chill pick? Oh yeah, and I guess spoiler warning for this article if you haven’t seen Kpop Demon Hunters because I will be including some (mild) plot points in this article.


Saja Boys - Soda Pop

Release: June 20, 2025

Genres: Dance-Pop, K-Pop, Film Soundtrack, Funktronica, Future House

I don’t think it’ll be contentious whatsoever for me to say that 2025 has been one of the absolute worst and most dead years of pop music that I can remember. I’ll have a lot of not very kind things to say in my worst list at the end of the year, but in short, this year has been, to quote Sean Fay-Wolfe, “2024’s victory lap”. Most of the biggest songs of the year are either long-dead 2024 leftovers or songs that bubbled up from very late 2024 and are still just sticking around because there’s just nothing else right now. But at long last, it feels like there might be some actual shakeup on the charts; coming from the Kpop Demon Hunters soundtrack. The movie is basically 2025’s Encanto; the soundtrack is taking advantage of a really weak chart environment and maintaining stability on the charts (ftr, that’s a good thing in my eyes because the soundtrack slaps). Now, the big song from the soundtrack is “Golden”, which is an incredible song as well, but I cannot lie, “Soda Pop” has had a fucking chokehold on me ever since I saw the movie. The Saja Boys are a fictional K-pop boyband within the movie, comprised of demons and framed as the film’s antagonists. The song is pure bubblegum, or I guess, soda. It’s amazingly cheesy and stupid and it clearly doesn't have a serious bone in its body. And that obscures the fact that in the context of the movie, it’s actually presented as the villain song. The funktronica groove is super addictive with a key change that lands really nicely. It’s enough to where the whistling doesn’t really faze me at all. Sonically this feels like Justin Timberlake’s “CAN’T STOP THE FEELING!” if BTS sang it. And the lyrics are cleverly written where outside of the context of the movie it’s just a cheesy upbeat boyband love song possibly in the vein of something One Direction would’ve released in 2012. But in the context of the movie, it’s about how the demon boyband is actually, quite literally saying that they wanna consume the people. So ultimately, yeah, I love this song, genuinely one of the best pop songs of 2025; I’ll give it a strong 9/10 for its addictive funktronica groove and the charming yet slightly sinister lyrics helping this work both in and out of context of the movie. Absolutely recommended, both the song and the film!!

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