The Visionary Work of f(x)’s ‘4 Walls’

The summer of 2015 was a time of transition for K-Pop.

That year as stalwart groups from the late aughts and early 2010s disbanded, fresh sounds emerged in South Korea. The shift began with a house beat from LDN Noise, a British production and songwriting duo who produced “View” for the boy group SHINee and fairly quickly “View” flipped the sound of mainstream K-Pop. The smash success of view was a win for SM Entertainment, the label behind SHINee and a leader of second generation K-Pop. But the pressure was on to continue the company’s success as new groups poured in from other companies such as JYP and YG.

But perhaps the group best positioned to lead the company into the third generation, very well hidden in plain sight, was  f(x). This was a girl group that was never on time and nearly always ahead of the curve. 

In the autumn of 2015, f(x) released 4 Walls, their final album in a short but stellar career and their first as a four member group. 4 Walls advanced the house production that SHINee pioneered with “View”, a sound that SHINee’s Key declared “was supposed to be major”, and repurposed it with their innovative sound. The result was an album that Spin magazine declared put the girls in the running for “the world’s best pop group”.  

The release of 4 Walls followed a year-long hiatus and the departure of the group’s macknae Sulli. Lineup changes are almost expected in longrunning K-Pop groups, but the departure of Sulli, a fan favorite, could have easily handicapped f(x). Sulli’s departure intersected at a time when the f(x) members embarked on several solo endeavors that left a question mark on the group’s future. 

4 Walls is a tour-de-force but the album is often overlooked in favor of Pink Tape, an EP that placed a larger emphasis on concepts due to the album’s packaging as a pink VHS tape. This fact is disappointing: 4 Walls still sounds as fresh in 2022 as it did when it was released seven years ago and for this reason it’s worth revisiting. 

“f(x) is always fresh and special,” Victoria, the group’s leader, declared in an interview with Naver the week of the album’s release. 

More metaphorically, f(x) was designed to cut K-Pop open with a razor sharp blade. 

As the group matured, the girls initiated an industry coup that transformed how K-Pop can both sound and look. Under SM’s direction, f(x) cultivated absurdity and pivoted conversations around the merits of artistry inside of an industry that largely directed idols’ output. I would liken f(x) as noonas to SM’s current supergroup NCT; there would be no “Sticker” without “Rum Pum Pum”, a song that is preposterously about a root canal. 

Many fans have rightfully defined f(x) as the “weird little sister of K-Pop”. But here’s where things get meta: one member, Krystal Jung, actually is the little sister of Jessica, a former member of Girls Generation, one of the most popular – and conventional – groups of the 2010s. 

f(x) were, instead, created to appeal to the girls who didn’t see themselves in the K-Pop market. They were the first group to include an unapologetically androgynous member with the recruitment of Amber Liu, an American rapper, who was personally scouted for her style. Their leader Victoria, of Chinese descent, and Krystal, a Korean-American, reflected a global strategy by SM to include different Asian identities. The group rounded out with Sulli, a talented former child actress, and LUNA, a powerful vocalist who will soon star on the Broadway musical KPOP. 

Their breakthrough came with “Electric Shock” in 2012, a song that sounds punk even today, but it wasn’t until the release of Pink Tape the following year that f(x) gained critical acclaim. 

Sulli’s departure from f(x) two years after the release of Pink Tape was a challenge for SM. Min Hee Jin, the company’s art director who is now associated with NewJeans, said, “It was very hard to create a new image after Sulli’s departure and to restructure the group with four members. A visual left. We had to cover that up. I had the task of making the group seem whole again.” 

One way that SM envisioned reinventing f(x) was through the album’s art direction. The EP’s name 4 Walls could be read as a direct acknowledgement that this was a new era for the group with four members. But SM also wanted to push the concept into the fourth dimension with an art exhibition in an Itaewon gallery. Visitors could peer inside of a room where videos and images of each member were projected to walls, the ceiling and a large piece of plexiglass that separated visitors from the room. But similar to early aughts K-Pop, there was only so close you could get to the art. 

View of the exhibitoin in Itaewon.

“I wanted to release 4 Walls quickly,” Krystal told Naver in 2015. She believed that the album was some of their best yet, particularly the lead single. The title song, she said, “is my favorite track.” But to my ears, it is also the album’s safest. It isn’t until the third track, “Deja Vu”, that the girls deploy their best strategy of hurling everything and the kitchen sink at you. The song takes off with a synthy beat, scrambled production and an absolutely infectious “whoo hoo” that drops in at the chorus. 

f(x)’s hidden ace throughout 4 Walls is the supremely talented songwriter KENZIE, a Berklee Music grad, who has written some of the most well-known songs at SM. It is KENZIE who has shaped the sound of SM better than anyone across multiple generations, and she gives f(x) two excellent b-sides: “Papi” and “Cash Me Out”. 

Where I feel f(x) strikes the best balance between weirdness and accessibility on 4 Walls is “X”, a song that fuses 80s power pop and PC Music. “Chemical X/ Our hands touch/ I can’t recover” they sing in a beat that gets warped, twisted and spit out. The first time I listened to it, I immediately hit repeat.

In a positive review for Pitchfork, critic Sheldon Pearce noted, “some of 4 Walls’ strongest collaborations involve producer LDN Noise, who creates pop songs with bridges that function as hooks and transitions that overlap to keep songs stimulating.” The house and electro-beats come in heavy midway here. “Rude Love” blasts a piano house production from LDN Noise under the refrain “I’m wanting you, baby” and sounds unlike anything f(x) previously recorded. It’s pure power pop and hints at their potential had they been given another album.

“Rude Love” feels the most akin to SHINee’s “View”, the song that brought house music and streetwear to K-Pop. Both tracks reflect the music I heard in the nightclubs in 2015 as my friends and I danced until we were sticky with sweat. When I listen to these songs, it doesn’t feel like I was alone in the genesis of self I found in dark nightclubs. That summer all of the members of f(x) and SHINee were reaching their mid-twenties. As my friends and I explored our identities and found rebirth on the dance floor, it felt like the members of SHINee and f(x) were experiencing similar revelations.

Critics of f(x) have lobbied that their concept is just as carefully cultivated as any other girl group of their generation, even if their aesthetics are pulled from hipsters. Fair enough. But the members’ personalities feel entirely authentic: Often, in interviews, the girls came across as awkward and unsure of themselves. Amber would stumble over her Korean; Krystal sometimes struggled to appear perky and the girls often seemed wary of the roles they were expected to hold in public. To the girls (and queers) who felt that they didn’t fit in, f(x) represented a group of girls who improbably became idols and who likewise had no interest in maintaining the image of one.  And maybe this is what we hear most clearly in their music today: A group at odds with the industry that created them; five teenagers and later young adults struggling to be heard as themselves. 

In an interview following Sulli’s death, Amber remembered the tension she felt as a teen in f(x). “Starting at such a young age and being thrown into the industry, you’re told what to do, what to say, what to think, what to look like,” recalled Amber. She learned to be agreeable, saying, “Okay, if that’s what it is, I have to do it. If that’s what I want, if I want to chase my dreams, if I want to do this dream job, that’s what I have to do.”

In the years following 4 Walls release and Sulli’s death, all of the remaining members of f(x) chose to not renew their contracts with SM. While each member has gone on to pursue solo endeavors, f(x)’s brilliant place in K-Pop cannot be duplicated. 

Today 4 Walls is a reminder: You’re never boxed in if you can walk through walls.