A Midsummer NMIXX's Dream

The record

A Midsummer NMIXX’s Dream is NMIXX’s third single album, released on 11 July 2023 with two tracks: the title track ‘Party O’Clock’ and ‘Roller Coaster’. It came four months after expérgo and sits halfway to Fe3O4: BREAK the following January.

JYP Entertainment’s album introduction describes the title track as a party in a midsummer-night forest. The Korea Herald reported that the song was written and produced by the label’s founder and producer Park Jin-young, and that it was the first NMIXX song he took part in producing. By the same report the second track, ‘Roller Coaster’, came out ahead of the album itself.

Reviews

NME placed ‘Roller Coaster’ twenty-second among its 25 best K-pop songs of 2023, published on 19 December that year. The entry describes the song this way: “The song evokes the tropical house mastery of classic K-pop bangers – think SHINee’s ‘View’ and f(x)’s ‘4 Walls’ – but lends it a tinge of innocence and girlhood that makes it feel like a spritz of cool water in the hot summer.” It closes: “Some may argue that ‘Roller Coaster’ doesn’t exactly fall under NMIXX’s brand of experimental music, but it’s hard to fight against a feel-good tune evoking the inherent romance of summer.”

The same entry names the song’s ending as its best bit. “The song could not have ended on a better note than the outro performed by Kyujin and Jiwoo,” NME wrote.

Among the tracks

The title track ‘Party O’Clock’ is the track Park Jin-young produced, and the album introduction sets it in a midsummer-night forest.

The track the critical pages named is ‘Roller Coaster’. NME’s year-end feature picked it as the twenty-second song of its year, citing the tropical-house line it descends from and the feeling of summer it carries. The song was released ahead of the album and circulated as a single of its own as well.

Numbers

NME picked ‘Roller Coaster’, from this single album, as the twenty-second of its 25 best K-pop songs of 2023 on 19 December 2023.