On the 5th March 2015, Super Junior members Donghae and Eunhyuk came together to release their first studio album The Beat Goes On as a sub-unit. “Growing Pains” is the album’s title track used for the promotional period. “Growing Pains” highlights the singers’ pain of forgetting about the women they love.
The music video accompanying the song tells the story of two different men and the pain they go through; when dealing with forgetting the women they love. Focusing first on Donghae, he starts the video off by sitting in a therapist’s office; the therapist is holding a vintage gold pocket watch, which he uses to hypnotize Donghae. After being hypnotized to forget the women he loves, Donghae resumes his normal routine, but he starts to get confusing flashbacks of a strange woman and their time spent together. Flashbacks experienced by Donghae are affecting him so much that he ends up back at the therapist’s office to find out what is happening.
Eunhyuk’s plot line showcases the situation that drives him to want to get the memories of the woman he loves erased. Eunhyuk is pacing in his bedroom, being tormented by memories of the rejection, when he proposed to her. The rest of Eunhyuk’s plot line revolves around his efforts in winning his girlfriend back; for example, he gives her a bouquet of roses, before ultimately being rejected for a final time. With this final rejection, Eunhyuk decides he is unable to live with the pain and memories of his love. He finds that his solution is to erase these memories. While watching Eunhyuk trying to win his girlfriend back, viewers are shown flashbacks of the couple’s time together. Donghae’s plot line is much simpler to understand than Eunhyuk’s, as Donghae’s is more about living without the memories of the woman he loves.
Dotted between these scenes are three different scene sets: individual, group, and dancing. Individual scenes have Donghae and Eunhyuk singing in an alley with glowing neon lights in the background, while the group scene has Donghae and Eunhyuk standing back to back on a rooftop with a camera spinning around them. With the final set being a dance scene, Donghae and Eunhyuk are accompanied by back up dancers on the rooftop of a Korean high-rise building.
The English lyric translation is: “I tried going into my lost memories / But now I can’t see you / I discovered ourselves already disappeared / So it hurts (it hurts so much)”, “But I hope you aren’t hurting as much as me / I hope for this every day, countlessly / I hope you won’t remember as much as I do / I hope you’re better than me (oh today and tomorrow)”, “One Two Three Four Five (I put it all down today) / I guess I’m forgetting (I can’t really see you) / Five Four Three Two One, I think time is up.” These lyrics have influenced the direction of the video as the lyrics talk about not only forgetting, but the pain of trying to recover the lost memories. The lyrics also talk about the singers not wanting their ex-partners to be hurting either from the split.
Listeners’ emotions are heightened further with the use of guitars ranging from bass to acoustic accompanied by keyboards and drums to give the song a feel of a ballad, with a hint of a dance backing track. An upbeat twist mixed with the mellow singing allows the listeners to enjoy the song without being overwhelmed by the dance beat.