The 2020s File Feature
The Feels
The Feels: TWICE's First English-Language Single and Its Global Crossover "The Feels" represented a significant moment in both the career of TWICE and in the…
01 The Story
The Feels: TWICE's First English-Language Single and Its Global Crossover
"The Feels" represented a significant moment in both the career of TWICE and in the broader story of K-pop's crossover into the anglophone mainstream, being the South Korean girl group's first single recorded entirely in English. Released on October 1, 2021, through Republic Records in partnership with JYP Entertainment, the song was designed with explicit international commercial ambitions and delivered on those ambitions with a performance on the Billboard Hot 100 that marked a new high-water mark for the group in the American market.
TWICE, formed through the JYP Entertainment reality competition show "Sixteen" in 2015, had by 2021 established themselves as one of the most commercially successful girl groups in K-pop history, with a string of Korean-language hits that had performed enormously in South Korea, Japan, and across East and Southeast Asia. Their decision to record and release an English-language single reflected both the group's growing international ambitions and the broader industry recognition that K-pop's global moment had arrived and that English-language material could help extend reach into markets where language remained a barrier for some listeners.
The song was written by a team that included Sam Hollander, a highly regarded American songwriter whose credits included work with Panic! at the Disco, One Direction, and Katy Perry, among many others. Hollander's involvement brought considerable craft and commercial instinct to the track, and the resulting song had the polish and accessibility of professionally constructed mainstream pop while retaining a warmth and personality consistent with TWICE's established identity.
Production on "The Feels" was handled by a team that created a bright, upbeat pop track with a synth-pop foundation and a chorus designed for immediate memorability. The production aesthetic drew on the effervescent quality that had characterized much of TWICE's earlier K-pop work while making choices specific to English-language pop conventions, finding a balance that felt neither like a compromise of one tradition nor an awkward imposition of another.
"The Feels" debuted at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 following its release, making TWICE only the second K-pop girl group to chart on the Hot 100, after BLACKPINK. The achievement was significant both as a commercial milestone and as a symbol of K-pop's growing commercial penetration in the American market. The song also charted on the Billboard Global 200 and performed strongly in multiple international markets, confirming its global appeal.
The music video for "The Feels" was directed with the visual polish and choreographic precision that TWICE's audience expected, featuring elaborate set design, synchronized dance sequences, and the individually showcased personalities of each of the group's nine members. The video accumulated millions of views within hours of its release and was widely shared on social media platforms including TikTok, where TWICE had cultivated a substantial following in the years preceding the single's release.
The song's commercial debut on Republic Records represented a strategic partnership between one of the largest major labels in the United States and JYP Entertainment, reflecting the music industry's recognition that K-pop had achieved a scale of commercial significance that warranted full major label support rather than the specialty distribution arrangements that had previously characterized the relationship between Korean entertainment companies and American distribution infrastructure.
Critical reception for "The Feels" was positive, with reviewers noting the song's effective blending of K-pop production sensibility and anglophone pop convention, as well as the group's collective vocal performance and the evident care with which the English-language phonetics had been managed. For a group whose primary language of performance had always been Korean and Japanese, the transition to English was handled with considerable ease, suggesting sustained effort in preparation.
The song's release came during a period when TWICE were actively expanding their American touring presence, performing at larger venues and for increasingly diverse audiences than the K-pop specialty shows that had previously defined their North American live presence. "The Feels" served as a commercial calling card in this expansion, a demonstration that the group could compete on mainstream pop terms as well as in the K-pop specialty market.
Within the history of K-pop crossover attempts, "The Feels" occupies an interesting position: not the first or the most commercially successful English-language single from a K-pop act, but a well-constructed and warmly received example of how the genre can meet anglophone pop on its own terms without abandoning the qualities that make K-pop distinctive. The song stands as a document of the moment when K-pop's global expansion reached a new level of maturity and strategic sophistication.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind "The Feels": Love as Overwhelming Force and K-Pop's Language of Joy
"The Feels" occupies a lyrical and emotional space that is entirely characteristic of K-pop's relationship with romantic love: the song describes being overwhelmed by feeling, by the physical and psychological effects of attraction, as something joyful and exciting rather than threatening or complicated. The narrator is swept up by "the feels," that contemporary colloquialism for strong emotion, and the song's energy and production mirror that swept-up quality throughout. This is pop music in the mode of pure pleasure, not asking difficult questions but inhabiting the most uncomplicated dimension of romantic feeling with full and genuine enthusiasm.
The choice to write the song in English, for a group whose native languages are Korean and Japanese and whose audience has historically engaged with their music across a language barrier, is itself meaningful. It represents an act of translation not just linguistic but cultural, an attempt to meet an anglophone audience in their own linguistic register while bringing the aesthetic sensibility of K-pop to that encounter. The fact that the translation works, that the song feels natural rather than awkward in English, speaks to the group's genuine versatility and to the quality of the songwriting collaboration with Sam Hollander.
The term "the feels" as a concept has particular resonance in the digital cultural context from which it emerged. It is internet-native slang, originally spread through social media and fan communities, that describes emotional experience in terms that are simultaneously precise and deliberately casual, acknowledging feeling while maintaining a kind of knowing lightness about it. For TWICE to build a song around this phrase is a statement of cultural fluency, a demonstration that the group is engaged with the digital culture through which K-pop fandom operates globally rather than simply the Korean entertainment industry context in which they were formed.
K-pop as a genre has developed a highly specific emotional vocabulary around romantic feeling, one that tends to emphasize the bright, overwhelming, and slightly disorienting quality of attraction rather than its darker or more complicated dimensions. This is not naivety but a deliberate aesthetic commitment, an understanding that pop music can create a space for the experience of uncomplicated joy that daily life rarely offers. "The Feels" participates fully in this aesthetic tradition, offering listeners an emotional experience of warmth and excitement that asks nothing in return except engagement.
The choreography that accompanies TWICE's live and video performances of the song is itself part of its meaning. K-pop's integration of synchronized dance with music means that the songs are experienced not just aurally but visually and kinesthetically, and the physical experience of watching the group perform "The Feels" contributes to the emotional content of the song in ways that pure audio listening does not fully capture. The precision and expressiveness of the performance are part of what the song is communicating.
The song's commercial ambitions and its emotional content are not in tension but rather consistent with each other. A song about the irresistible force of feeling, about being pulled toward something joyful that you cannot and do not want to resist, is well suited to function as a commercial introduction to an artist, an invitation to a new audience to be similarly drawn in. The self-referential quality of this alignment between content and function is one of the more charming dimensions of the track's construction.
For longtime TWICE fans, the English-language format represented a gesture of inclusion toward the parts of their global audience for whom Korean had remained a linguistic barrier, a recognition that the group's community extended beyond the K-pop specialty market and that those listeners deserved to be addressed in their own terms. For new listeners, the song provided an accessible entry point into a body of work with considerable depth and warmth behind it.
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