There’s a specific complaint that keeps surfacing among MYs, and it isn’t about the group at all — it’s about how everyone else is listening to them. Scroll through the r/aespa community’s discussion of what hooked people on the group and you’ll find an entire side conversation about phone speakers actively sabotaging some of the group’s strongest songs.

The Dirty Work problem

Dirty Work is the song that comes up constantly in this context. Fans describe it as a genuinely different track depending on what it’s played through — on a laptop speaker or phone, it can land as fine but unremarkable. Switch to real headphones or IEMs, and the bass that was barely audible before suddenly becomes the entire point of the song. One fan put it bluntly: they didn’t get why people liked it until they actually listened on decent gear, and then it “evolved into an entirely different song.”

That’s not exaggeration for effect. It’s a real production choice — Dirty Work leans hard on low-end frequencies to build its sultry, seductive tone, and cheap built-in speakers on TVs, laptops, and phones are notoriously bad at reproducing bass accurately. If the low end is where a song’s personality lives, and your hardware can’t render the low end, you’re not really hearing the song. You’re hearing a thinner version of it.

It’s not just one track

The same pattern shows up around Lemonade for some listeners, and it’s a big enough recurring theme that one fan specifically bought a soundbar for their TV after being underwhelmed by Dirty Work’s music video through built-in speakers, then coming back to it with better audio and being floored. Another describes the exact same arc: unimpressed on a laptop, “it all makes sense” the moment they switched to IEMs.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t fans making excuses for a weak song — it’s the opposite. It’s evidence of genuinely detailed production work that a lot of casual listening setups simply can’t deliver. Layered low-end, UFO-style sound effects tucked into a mix, small details that reward attention — those are things a producer put there on purpose, and they only land if the playback chain can carry them.

Why this matters beyond one song

K-pop still gets dismissed sometimes as disposable, over-produced pop with nothing going on beneath the surface. The MY response to that, at least in this thread, isn’t defensiveness — it’s just “put on real headphones and listen again.” That’s a pretty confident thing to say about your favorite group’s discography, and it tracks with something else that comes up a lot in fan discussion: aespa’s catalog rewards close listening. The choreography breaks people cite as turning points (the Black Mamba drop, Giselle’s Next Level suit dance moment), the vocal handoffs fans can name precisely (Winter’s high note right after Ningning’s in Drama), the small sonic details baked into a mix — none of that is generic filler. It’s a discography built for people who are actually paying attention, not just half-listening in the background.

So if a song hasn’t clicked for you yet, the MYs in that thread have a pretty consistent piece of advice: check your speakers before you check the song.

What to actually try first

If you want the version of this experiment fans keep describing, Dirty Work is the obvious starting point — it’s the track that shows up most often in these comparisons, and the difference between phone-speaker Dirty Work and headphone Dirty Work is large enough that you’ll notice it within the first ten seconds. From there, a lot of MYs point to the same handful of songs as good tests of a listening setup: anything with a heavy bass drop, or a track built around vocal layering rather than just a lead line on top of instrumentation.

It’s worth doing this with a full mini album in one sitting, too, rather than a single song in isolation. A few fans specifically describe lying down with decent IEMs and playing through an entire release start to finish — not background listening, actually paying attention — and coming away with a different read on tracks they’d previously written off as filler. Whether or not you end up agreeing with every take in that thread, it’s a low-effort way to hear a discography you already like in a version you might like even more.