After months of working through the exhaustive BOYS24 roll-out process, IN2IT debuted last fall with an incredibly generic, tropical house inspired single. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the newly released SnapShot rights the ship by balking the very trends its predecessor embraced.

As a pure song, SnapShot is really nothing special. But, it scores a lot of points for going against the grain and embracing k-pop’s anything-goes past. Its instrumental could have easily recycled the same deep house loop we’ve heard a million times over, but the electronic beat goes harder and crazier, offering a more aggressive sense of propulsion. This is accented with a playground of effects, from swooping synths to repeated spoken interludes that are just cheesy enough to give the song a bit of playful punch. It’s all in service to SnapShot‘s concept of voguing on the runway — certainly not the comeback approach you’d expect to see or hear from a male idol group.

It’s risks like these that rookie groups must take to overcome such a crowded landscape, and it’s heartening that IN2IT are able to pull it off. SnapShot‘s big pop chorus definitely helps smooth things over. Again, its melody isn’t particularly engaging or inventive, but its energy hearkens back to modern k-pop’s second and third generations, when the industry borrowed outside trends and threw them into a blender to create big-sounding material that embraced its inherent ridiculousness. Everything in SnapShot‘s arsenal — from the rap to the endlessly restless production — feels over the top. And in this day of increasingly similar trap and EDM templates, that is something to be celebrated.

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