ILLIT's New K-Pop Single Has Filipino Fans Hearing Budots, the Sound DJ Love Pioneered in Davao

On October 5, BELIFT LAB posted a teaser for ILLIT's comeback single on the HYBE Labels YouTube channel. It's a challenge-style clip: four members throwing finger guns and pursing a whistle to a jaunty, snapping beat, set to a song called "I'll Arrest You." Within days, Filipino listeners had renamed it in their heads. Online, it's just "the Budots one."

The beat chugs and whistles the way Budots does, the genre built from exactly that kind of noise two decades ago in Davao City by a producer who still goes by DJ Love. Filipino fans online were quick to point out the resemblance. Nobody at BELIFT LAB or HYBE has said a word about it either way.

A whistle that means two different things

"I'll Arrest You" is the title track on ILLIT's fifth mini-album, BREAK EVEN, due October 26 at 6 p.m. Korean time. It's credited to HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk ("Hitman" Bang), in-house producer Slow Rabbit and the Argentine duo EQ. The Budots comparison is a fan theory, not a confirmed sample or a co-write.

That's worth being honest about. Whistle hooks and chopped, snapping percussion turn up across plenty of dance-adjacent K-pop and EDM already; a producer could land on this pattern without ever hearing a Budots track. Nobody involved has said where the sound came from, and we haven't found a credit, a sample clearance or a quote confirming the connection in either direction.

What Budots actually is

Budots came out of Davao in the early 2000s. DJ Love, born Sherwin Tuna, was self-taught on FL Studio, building tracks out of dog barks, neighborhood quarrels and the ordinary noise of a Davao street. For years the genre was written off in Manila as baduy, unfashionable, strictly a province thing. DJ Love kept making it anyway, and founded the Camus Team, a group built to pull neighborhood kids toward dance instead of the street, under the line "Yes to Dance, No to Drugs."

That work is finally getting noticed outside the Philippines. DJ Love's debut album, Budots World (Reloaded), came out on the UK's Eastern Margins label, and he's since played the label's Margins United festival in London. Loopliner has covered what came next: a Manila streetwear label built its final 2026 drop around his story, and producers working in Taiwan's rave scene and in Jersey club alike have thanked him by name in their own liner notes.

Recognition, the hard way and the easy way

That contrast stings a little. DJ Love spent most of two decades getting Budots taken seriously, through Facebook livestreams during the pandemic and years of being dismissed as too local, before an overseas label agreed to put his record out properly. If a HYBE producer landed on the same whistle-and-snap pattern independently, that's how pop music works; genres borrow from each other constantly, and nobody owns a rhythm. But it does mean a label with the reach of HYBE can put a Budots-shaped beat in front of tens of millions of listeners in a single week, something DJ Love never had.

BREAK EVEN drops October 26. Whether "I'll Arrest You" actually draws on Budots, or sounds like it by coincidence, nobody at BELIFT LAB has said.

Cover photo: DJ Love, via Clavel Magazine.