Fire's Chill Pick - November 2025

Hey guys, it’s Fire here with the monthly Chill Pick article!! I hope you guys had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying Black Friday! If you can take a minute or two of your time to distract yourselves from the discounts and read this article, I’ve got a real surprise banger for you to enjoy!! It’s not even a discount offer, it’s 100% free!!





Hoang - Are You Still There

Release: November 7, 2025

Genres: Melodic Bass, J-Pop, Synthpop



So if you know me on Pulse, you might know that I was really into Hoang’s music in the COVID-19 lockdowns, to the point where he had many, many hits on my old personal chart haha. In the years since though, I’ve admittedly not had the same love for his music as I did back in 2020-21. Part of it is my music taste evolving, but part of it is also because one of Hoang’s worst pitfalls is that he has a really bad tendency to recycle his sound over and over, essentially making the exact same song over and over with the only real difference between songs being the vocalist he chooses. It doesn’t help that the one time he tried to experiment with a new sound, it was with “Don’t Want To Be Lonely” with VLCN and Skye Silansky, which was...a pretty terrible song. It paints the picture of an artist who doesn’t know how to evolve his sound effectively and might be just running in place. But I do check out his new songs every now and then because I know I’ll probably like the songs, even if I likely won’t revisit them after a week. I’ll have some words to say about his debut album at the end of the year, not all of it will be very kind, you’ve been warned.



Anyways, earlier this month, he dropped “Are You Still There”, and I figured that I would at least like it by virtue of it being done in a formula I generally like, but I didn’t think I'd be knocked out of the park or anything. But...holy shit, “Are You Still There” is Hoang’s best song in years! For the first time possibly ever, Hoang shows tangible signs of artistic evolution. Yeah, the song is still rooted in the melodic guitars and melodic bass percussion that are all too familiar for him, but what shocked me was the fact that this song was actually sung almost entirely in Japanese. I admittedly couldn’t find anything about who the vocalist here is, but the Japanese singing already makes this stand out from Hoang’s other releases. It’s not just the language that’s different here, either! Around the 2 minute mark, the song swerves into more J-Pop synth textures and it immediately hooked me because it was a surprising swerve that Hoang actually pulled off while not abandoning his signature sound!! In that way, the song feels like a natural evolution of his sound. Now analyzing the lyrics of any Hoang song is kinda pointless to me because they’re always in a familiar “yearning for something lost” mold. And this song really is no different. But still, this was a shocking swerve that was executed very well. On sound alone, I give this song a 10/10, absolutely fantastic track, Hoang’s best song in years, possibly ever – highly recommended!! I really hope this is a signpost of Hoang continuing to evolve his sound! Happy thanksgiving and until the next article, remember to keep it Fire!!