Kumi Koda serves Family Mart Gaga at the House of Gucci premiere in "4 More"

Kumi Koda had announced her Best album Best ~2000-2020~, so it's no surprise that it comes with a new song. Except this song isn't featured on the Best release. This makes sense given that the album is exclusively for her 20th anniversary and everything released within that period. But the Best release is absolutely going to eclipse this song, which is a shame. Because it's actually pretty decent, even if it's not very memorable.

What I'm about to say is gonna sound weird. But even though Kumi Koda's new song is R&B, it sounds like K-Pop R&B.

It told you it was gonna sound weird. Lemme try and talk through this mess of a statement.

Even the term K-Pop R&B is a strange one, because so much of it is produced and written by American R&B producers; especially when it comes to SM Entertainment, who have been latching onto the style of R&B that "4 More" is based on for the past few years now, to such a point that it's become one of their 'signature' sounds. And even long before any of it involved American talent, Korean writers and producers mimicked popular trends in R&B. But even so, there is something K-Pop about this Kumi Koda cut. It's no secret that Kumi Koda has her eyes and ears on K-Pop, like many of us, and we've seen and heard the influence of it over the past few years. Even before the hallyu fully swept the world, Kumi had recorded songs with TVXQ and BoA. That was more because they were already huge in Japan as opposed to their K-Pop credentials, but we'll let her have it.

Either way, "4 More" is a nice song. My only problem with it are Kumi's vocals. They just don't sound like they're in the most comfortable place that they could and should be. If the song had been dropped  by maybe one or two steps into a lower key, Kumi would sound so much better and be able to settle into her lower tone, which would have set this song off in a big way. But still, it's a nice song and Kumi looks great in the video. I'd like to think Kumi would learn something from this song and video, but she won't. This song isn't some outlier. It's part of the wave of songs we've gotten this far, which means they will all feature on an album together, which will probabaly drop during the Summer of 2022.

It's weird that Kumi would push a new song now when she has a Best album due to hit stores and streaming in a couple of weeks with new versions of old songs on it. Surely releasing one of those with a new video would have made more sense. Her entire 20th anniversary rollout has felt unnecessarily long and messy, but it's on brand for Kumi Koda.

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