AD MARE

The record

AD MARE is NMIXX’s debut single album, released on 22 February 2022 with two tracks, ‘占 (TANK)’ and the title track ‘O.O’. The second single album, ENTWURF, followed seven months later, and the first full-length album, Blue Valentine, closes with the two songs ‘O.O’ was mixed from, carried separately as ‘O.O Part 1 (Baila)’ and ‘O.O Part 2 (Superhero)’.

JYP Entertainment’s album introduction says the record is where the group first shows a genre it calls MIXX POP — two or more genres inside one song, so that a listener meets several tastes at once — and describes ‘O.O’ as taking baile funk, a genre it calls unfamiliar in Korea, into the group’s own style. Financial News reported that the group made its formal debut with this release.

Reviews

Idology ran the title track in its monthly note on the singles of February 2022, published on 16 March that year. Quibi, who wrote the entry, opens: “The place where NMIXX does not feel like a JYP group is a certain grandness.” He sets that against the label’s girl groups from Wonder Girls onward, whose debut songs were plain-spoken pop, and finds the planning around this group a far larger block. He reads the difference in the lyric — “The bold nerve that used to point inward, at a small group inside the real world, now points at an unknown other world” — and in the visuals: “Unlike the past, which framed each member doggedly, the debut trailer and the music video unfold on an enormous scale and hint at a direction that has changed at its root.”

The same piece places MIXX POP inside the K-pop of the previous three decades. Quibi divides genre-mixing into songs where a foreign part cuts in for a moment and songs that stack different parts on top of each other, and finds that ‘O.O’ does not sit cleanly in either. He then takes that instability as the song’s own material: “Turned over, though, instability can become a thrill and a source of fun of its own.” It comes through, he wrote, “best in the outstanding stage performance, and, meeting the fragmented and decontextualised way music is consumed now on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, it gains still more use.”

Among the tracks

‘O.O’ is the track Idology named. By the album introduction the production team THE HUB, which has worked with TWICE, ITZY, TREASURE and ENHYPEN, led the writing, with the producer Dr.JO alongside them.

The opening track, ‘占 (TANK)’, is described in the same text as a song that likens facing the world to a tank, with the single Chinese character 占 — to occupy — as its title. It is a hip-hop and R&B song over a punk-rock base that opens on a rough distorted guitar, written and arranged with Ryan Jhun and Dem Jointz.

Numbers

On Circle Chart’s weekly album chart the record entered at number three in week 9 of 2022, the week of release (20 to 26 February). On the same chart’s monthly count it was number three for February 2022, with 161,312 copies sold that month.

‘O.O’ entered Circle Chart’s weekly digital chart at number 147 in week 10 and rose to number 81 in week 13 (20 to 26 March), staying on the chart through week 19. At the end of that year Idology picked twelve of the 36 idol acts that debuted in 2022 as its rookies of the year, and NMIXX was among them.