Only a month after the release of their first full-length album, Cosmic Girls have returned with a bid for the summer crown once held by their former label-mates Sistar. With their peppy, mile-a-minute style, you’d think Cosmic Girls + summer would be a match made in heaven. And with the right song, I still think it could be. Unfortunately, Kiss Me is not that song — especially when compared to Sistar classics like Loving U, Shake It and I Swear.

To be fair, Kiss You is a CF (commercial film) endorsement track, and these kinds of releases tend to be more lightweight and throwaway than proper comebacks. Judged by that standard, the song is perfectly serviceable, even if it opts for the most generic summer melodies available. My favorite element of the instrumental is the guitar riff that underlines the verses and choruses. It adds a nice power pop crunch that we don’t often hear in girl group tracks. Pushing this sound even further could have resulted in a more memorable track, but the production never hits the kind of peak I wanted.

The same can be said about the girls themselves. For a group with thirteen members, Kiss Me sounds as if it was delivered by a single voice. This has been a concern I’ve had with the Cosmic Girls since the beginning. You would think that such a large group would have recruited a greater variety of vocal tones to lend their music a sense of aural diversity. And maybe the girls are capable of bringing more individuality to the table. But on Kiss Me, each and every member sings in the same cutesy, airy voice, effectively cancelling each other out. It’s the unfortunate case of a song’s instrumental having more personality than the actual artist, which results in a very middle-of-the-road summer release.