2025 J-Pop Song Review: f5ve – Magic Clock

The J-Pop girl group f5ve has just released their new song, "Magic Clock" (f5ve, Youtube, 2025). This evening, I took a few minutes to sit down and patiently replay the music video a few times. Despite the video's short length, it sparks a great amount of discussion. 

First off, this song is unique compared to a lot of other songs that I have reviewed on this blog. It's is one of the first (or maybe the first) electric pop song I have reviewed on this blog. While electronic pop can be enjoyable and energizing to listen to, the way it is incorporated in this song feels a bit different. The singers in the video are talented entertaining to listen to, but their singing feels overshadowed by the  electronic music in the background. For future songs from them, I would like to hear what their singing would sound like with this background effect turned down (not completely removed because it does sound good at the right volume). 

As for the concept of the "Magic Clock" in the video it appears that whenever the clock changes by the unnamed man, the ages of the girls change in the music video. It was a creative concept to add to the song which is a plus for me. It kept me viewing the music video until the end to see how it was going to end, and the ending (which I will not spoil) was fairly funny too. That being said, there is one big thing about the song that that just happened to get to me a little.

There is an overall feeling of K-Pop from the song, and while I am a big fan of both K-Pop and J-Pop, this is not one of my major preferences when listening to J-Pop songs. Over the years of listening to J-Pop, my preferences are that it sticks to the traditional Japanese background music to sound more fitting. This song has a bit of K-Pop in it vibes from the dancing, visuals and electronic beats in the background that make it feel more like it's marketed towards a worldwide audience than towards Japan,which is not my style of J-Pop music, but I can see why a lot of other people like it. There is nothing wrong with the music video, the quality or the song, but I would have liked it better if it incorporated a more J-Pop sound to it than mixing K-Pop sounds in the background music because that is what I am used to when listening to J-Pop.  

Update based on response to Adam: I like electropop, I just mean that I felt that the implementation of electropop in this song could be improved. Thank you.

Update message number 2: In my post, Popular K-Pop & J-Pop Terms Explained Using Song Examples , number 4 of the J-Pop terms or number 9 overall addresses a Perfume song as Adam was discussing. I also need to edit my last paragraph to be more factual. Thank you for reading my review and I do happen to like f5ve's music I just wanted to post a review where I would give a less than perfect score to a song because past reviews had too many near perfect scores.

With all that being said, below is my final rating of the song:

Verses: 8/10

Chorus: 8/10

Choreography: 7.5/10

Background Music: 4/10

Overall: 29.5/40 or 7.4/10