9 WAY TICKET

The record

9 WAY TICKET is the second single album by fromis_9, released on 17 May 2021. It carries three tracks, and the title track is ‘WE GO’.

The album introduction says the three songs are placed in the order of setting out, being away and the feeling left after coming home. The same page credits Park Ji-won with the lyrics on the opening track, ‘Airplane Mode’.

Sports Kyunghyang reported that a highlight medley of the three songs went up on the group’s official YouTube channel on 13 May, four days before release.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지), a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the record on 18 June 2021 in the monthly column it gives to the singles of the month before. One note is attached to this one, by Third.

Third placed the record alongside what came before it. It sits “on the same line as the change of the team’s colour that came with ‘Feel Good’ last year, and returns in a slightly brisker mood to match the season”, he wrote, hearing in the arrangement the same shape of a repeating guitar riff. There is a pleasure in imagining it played by a live band, he added, and with a point routine on top of it the stages are worth watching too, which leaves it “finished as a summer song that does not tire easily”.

Third also took up the concept that runs from the sleeve to the video: the individual teasers in masks, the travel photographs staged inside a studio, the cover art that recalls a passport, and a music video that gives the impression of being assembled live inside a video call. Every element is faithful to the concept, he wrote — “a single so thoroughly of a piece that it might one day be used as a record of where K-pop stood as it adapted to the pandemic”.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the record at number 17 on its monthly album chart for May 2021. ‘WE GO’ entered the Digital Chart at number 106 in week 21 (16 to 22 May), the week of release.