Stray Kids
Bang Chan spent his trainee nights at JYP Entertainment making beats under the alias CB97, working alongside Changbin (SpearB) and Han (J.One) as a rap crew they called 3RACHA, a name meant to taste like the spice they wanted their music to carry. When JYP handed Bang Chan the unheard-of task of hand-picking his own labelmates, he built Stray Kids around that same trio, debuting via a reality survival show in 2018. 3RACHA kept writing and producing most of the catalog itself, dragging trap, EDM, drill and glitch-hop into K-pop's idol-group machinery rather than outsourcing the sound to hired hitmakers. The group's refusal to hand over that control is the reason its catalog reads as a document of its producers' own listening habits.
When a Billboard interviewer told Stray Kids in 2019 that fans thought the teaser videos for the single "Side Effects" sounded like Billie Eilish, Bang Chan didn't deflect. "Aw yeah! We're real fans of Billie's music," he said, adding that the group's stage performance would "give off that vibe as well." "Side Effects" was 3RACHA's own admitted detour into hushed, bass-heavy psychedelic trance and EDM, a genre experiment the group's leader tied directly, in his own words, to what he'd been listening to.
listen forBoth tracks let a queasy, near-subsonic bass carry the song instead of a conventional drum pattern: "bury a friend" opens on a grinding low-end wobble before Eilish's whisper enters, and "Side Effects" rides that same hollowed-out throb under Stray Kids' group vocals as they trade the group's usual bright trap snap for something murkier. It's the claustrophobic, headphones-close scale Bang Chan pointed to when fans first drew the comparison.