On her new song “booboo,” Yaeji comes back raging. Sensitively. The NYC-via-Seoul producer made her name in 2017 on late-night club-pop tracks like “raingurl” and “Feel It Out” that, in just a few years, went from cool-kid party cuts to omnipresent summer staples. But the success of the former song left her, if not outright alienated, at least a little searching: “With the overpowering attention that came from ‘raingurl,’ I took a break from clubbing, dance music, and the underground scene,” she said in a statement. In the past few years, she’s dabbled in club music, but also off-kilter hip-hop spotlighting Brooklyn’s indie rap scene, plush art-pop, and a collab with Korean indie rock musician OHHYUK.
Yaeji’s new single “booboo,” though, feels like it was recorded straight from the decks at your best friend’s birthday. A rubbery Jersey club track that implores you to “dance and shake your booty from the left to the right,” “booboo” is surgical-grade party fuel, quickly ratcheting up in speed and intensity over its all-too-brief runtime. It’s not a rejection of Yaeji’s time away from the club: Halfway through “booboo,” she samples the hook of “raingurl,” turning the whole thing into a piece of canny meta-commentary. “You know the one time I wrote a banger that goes like/‘Make it raingurl make it’?” she muses, “You know that I wasn’t really ready at the time.” Nothing but dry eyes in Yaeji’s club: This is a celebration of growing up and growing into spaces you might not have really fit in before. And shaking your ass, of course.
