Why NMIXX's Debut Single 'O.O' Split K-Pop Fans in 2022

On February 22, 2022, JYP Entertainment's newest girl group NMIXX released its debut single "O.O" — and within hours, K-pop social media turned into what one culture writer called a "tyre fire." On South Korea's Melon chart, the song opened at a lowly No. 162 and slid to No. 220 the same day.

The backlash was loud enough that the UK's Daily Mail, which almost never covers K-pop, branded "O.O" the "worst song of all time." Yet that same week, NMIXX's debut album broke a sales record. Understanding how both things happened at once is the real story.

A seven-month wait for a girl group that didn't sound familiar

JYP Entertainment — the agency, or management company, that recruits, trains and brands K-pop idols before and after debut — is the label behind Twice and Itzy. It had not launched a new girl group since 2019, and it spent seven months building anticipation.

In July 2021, JYP even pre-sold a "blind package," a debut single sold before the group's name or sound was revealed, drawing over 61,000 orders. Anticipation had been building since Itzy's 2019 debut, and JYP's girl groups rarely arrive without a clear, easily marketed sound already attached.

Fans expecting another Itzy-style "girl crush" concept — the packaged image and sound an agency builds a group around — instead got a song that changed key, tempo and genre halfway through.

Two songs welded into one, on purpose

"O.O" splits into two distinct halves rather than building to one chorus. The opening section, later nicknamed "Baila," is a trap-inflected baile funk track. Partway through, with no bridge to smooth the transition, it jumps into "Superhero," a pop-rock section in a different key and a slower tempo.

Two years later, JYP released the two halves as separate standalone tracks on NMIXX's first studio album — confirmation that the jarring split was never a mixing accident.

What critics actually objected to

Global fans piled on within hours of release. The most-repeated complaints were:

• The abrupt, unresolved genre switch mid-song
• Lyrics that read as loosely connected fragments
• A songwriting credit list running to ten names
• A visible Coke Zero product placement in the music video

Writer Taylor Glasby, who covered the fallout for Dazed, noted that most of the anger targeted JYP Entertainment rather than the seven members themselves. But in K-pop, where an agency's decisions are treated as inseparable from a group's identity, the criticism still landed squarely on NMIXX.

A genre name invented two days after the backlash began

Here is the detail most retrospective coverage skips: JYP had not announced "MIXX POP" before release. The label introduced the term to Korean press on February 24 — two days after "O.O" was already trending as a disaster online.

To fans unfamiliar with how K-pop labels manage a rollout, the timing looked like damage control: give a confusing sound a name, and confusion becomes an artistic statement instead of a misstep. Whatever JYP's intent, the sequence fed suspicion rather than calming it.

The comparison JYP couldn't avoid: aespa's "Next Level"

Within the same day, aespa's 2021 hit "Next Level" — from rival label SM Entertainment — started trending again, purely because fans said "O.O" copied its mid-song genre-switching structure. SM had been building that technique into its groups' title tracks for years already.

The timing mattered because JYP was presenting "MIXX POP" as a new invention. If the underlying idea already belonged to a competing agency, the claim of originality looked hollow — and fans who track K-pop's major labels closely said so immediately and loudly.

SM and JYP are two of the four agencies — alongside HYBE and YG — that have dominated K-pop for two decades, and rivalry between their fandoms is constant. A hint of copying from a direct rival is treated far more harshly than borrowing from a smaller label would be.

A pirate ship that looked borrowed, too

A second controversy broke the same week. Fans of the boy group ATEEZ pointed out that shots in NMIXX's "O.O" video — a pirate ship sailing through pink clouds — closely resembled scenes from ATEEZ's 2019 video "Illusion," even though the two videos were made by different production companies.

A hashtag asking JYP to explain the resemblance trended on Korean social media. No public statement from JYP addressing the visual comparison has surfaced since — a gap that outlasted the initial news cycle.

A sales record and a chart flop, in the same week

This is the part international readers find hardest to square. NMIXX's debut album, "Ad Mare," sold 227,399 copies in its first week — a record at the time for a K-pop girl-group debut, ahead of that year's other major rookie act, Kep1er.

Physical album sales in K-pop are driven largely by devoted early fans who preorder multiple copies, partly to collect randomized photocards packed inside. Real-time streaming charts like Melon, by contrast, reflect a much wider and more casual listening public.

"O.O" satisfied the first group and alienated the second. That is why a record-breaking debut and a chart failure were both true in the same seven days.

The song that got better the more people heard it

Something shifted once NMIXX started performing "O.O" live without lip-syncing. Fans who watched the group sing the difficult, tempo-shifting song began reconsidering the track on its own terms, separate from their opinion of JYP.

Within weeks, "O.O" climbed roughly 170 spots on Melon to reach No. 50. Member Sullyoon told Dazed around that time that listeners would "get addicted" after five plays — a claim that, for a meaningful share of the audience, turned out to hold up.

JYP dialed back MIXX POP to win NMIXX its first trophy

The genre experiments continued into NMIXX's second single, "Dice," released that September — a "comeback," the K-pop term for any new single or album cycle, even for a group that never left. "Dice" swapped baile funk for big-band jazz but posted only modest chart numbers.

By 2023, JYP changed course. "Love Me Like This," released that March, traded jarring genre switches for a straightforward R&B-pop sound. It won NMIXX its first-ever music show trophy 400 days after debut, with members in tears on stage. Reviewers at the time called the new single "downright sane" compared with what had come before.

What's still unresolved

Two threads from February 2022 remain open. JYP has never issued a public response to the ATEEZ visual-similarity accusations, so that specific claim was never confirmed or denied on the record.

The larger question — whether "MIXX POP" was ever a genuinely new genre, or simply a name attached after the fact to a technique aespa had already popularized — is still debated.

Even the group has struggled to settle it: at a July 2023 showcase, a press event held around a release, member Haewon told reporters, "We are still trying to do MixPop, it's just that the difference between mixed genres isn't as noticeable," after fans said newer singles had quietly dropped the concept.

NMIXX returned to a fuller version of the sound in 2024, and in October 2025 topped Melon's chart for the first time with "Blue Valentine" — the first Melon No. 1 for a JYP girl group since Twice in 2020. Three years on, the single once called the worst song of all time had outlasted the controversy that greeted it.

NMIXX's title track evolution since "O.O"

Frequently asked

Why did fans hate NMIXX's "O.O"?

Fans criticized the abrupt, unresolved genre switch mid-song, fragmented lyrics, a songwriting credit list of ten names, and a visible Coke Zero product placement in the music video.

Did NMIXX copy aespa's "Next Level"?

Fans said "O.O" copied the mid-song genre-switching structure of aespa's "Next Level," even though SM Entertainment had already been building that technique into its groups' title tracks for years.

How did "O.O" do commercially despite the backlash?

NMIXX's debut album "Ad Mare" sold 227,399 copies in its first week, a record at the time for a K-pop girl-group debut, even though the single itself stalled on Melon.