3D (feat. Jack Harlow)

The song

‘3D (feat. Jack Harlow)’ is Jung Kook’s second solo single, released on 29 September 2023. It carries three tracks — the song, an instrumental and an alternate version — and the song opens the full-length album GOLDEN, which followed five weeks later.

The album introduction on Bugs describes an R&B pop song with a spare arrangement, a rhythm with weight behind it and a catchy sound that repeats. The same text says that where the earlier single Seven (feat. Latto) reworked the two-step of the early 2000s, this one draws on an old-school sound rooted in the hip-hop and dance of the middle of that decade. The lyric, it says, is about crossing the first and second dimensions to meet the other person in the third.

The introduction says Jack Harlow is the featured artist, and that BloodPop and David Stewart, who worked on BTS’s ‘Dynamite’, are in the credits. Jack Harlow appears in the music video, which the text says uses stairs and mirrors to draw the song’s wish to cross dimensions and see the other person. The video went up on the HYBE LABELS channel on the day of release.

Reviews

IZM’s Lee Seung-won opened his single review of October 2023 by asking what an overwhelming advantage it is to have no fixed colour. He wrote that Jung Kook, having taken on the colour of a contemporary pop star, “this time puts on Justin Timberlake’s coat over the top of it”. The same piece names “the plain melody, the message that is easy to grasp, the quiet rise and fall”, and says that “the direction, which follows the model of pop, is no different, but the newly added hip-hop rhythm gives it a little freshness”.

The Guardian’s Michael Cragg, reviewing GOLDEN in November 2023, named this song a US top-five hit and wrote that its glossy, sun-kissed sound recalls prime Justin Timberlake. He wrote: “The album takes off when Jung Kook can focus on his honeyed falsetto, as on the supple disco glide of Standing Next to You, or on 3D’s exhilarating chorus.”

What else is on it

The release carries the song, an instrumental and ‘3D - Alternate Ver.’. The label’s own distribution metadata prints the single as 3D and lists beside it the remix set 3D : The Remixes of 2 October, an A. G. Cook remix, slowed-down and sped-up versions, an MK remix of 30 October and a Justin Timberlake remix of 24 November, each as a release of its own.

Numbers

Cragg wrote in his GOLDEN review that the song reached the US top five. Five weeks after this single, the song opened GOLDEN as its first track.

What came after

Jung Kook released the full-length album GOLDEN five weeks later, on 3 November 2023, and the fan song Never Let Go in June the following year. Before this single came Seven (feat. Latto), in July of the same year.