Agust D

The record

Agust D is a ten-track record SUGA released on 16 August 2016. The album information page on Bugs credits it to Agust D, and the tracklist credits DJ Friz on ‘Intro : DT sugA’, Yankie on ‘Tony Montana’ and SURAN on ‘so far away’.

Writing about D-DAY in 2023, IZM’s Lee Hong-hyeon said SUGA had put out two mixtapes under the name Agust D and that D-DAY was his first full-length album. This record is the earlier of those two. NME reported on 5 April 2023 that it had been released in full on streaming services.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried Park Hee-a’s piece on the record on 4 December 2016. She began with the form: “For an idol, the mixtape as a tool is a thoroughly anti-commercial choice.”

The same piece summed up what the record reaches for: “It is a pursuit of a kind of reality.” She found the ground for that in how it was made, writing that “he shows an attitude that identifies where he lives with who he is, and, as if to prove that frame of mind, on every track he uses sources made by domestic composers and DJs, himself among them”, and adding that “the fact that you can feel an atmosphere close to the rough sound Korean rappers once worked in is not unrelated to that characteristic either”.

On the relation between the rapping and the tracks she wrote that “the tracks already hold more impact than they need, and the rapping answers with energy to match”. She then wrote that “the confidence you see in a batter swinging as he pleases may at times feel excessive, but it draws out a deep inner resonance”, and closed: “This is the greatest strength SUGA’s mixtape has.”

Among the tracks

The music video for ‘Agust D’ was uploaded to the HYBE LABELS channel on 15 August 2016, the day before release.

Of the opening ‘Intro : DT sugA’, Park wrote that it samples a James Brown song, and that the sample is there less to add the originality of hip-hop from abroad than as a sound source that brings out a fierce feeling. Of the featuring credits on the closing ‘so far away’ she wrote: “For his featured artists SUGA chose the domestic artists Yankee and Suran.”

What came after

The next record under the Agust D name was D-2 on 22 May 2020, and D-DAY followed on 21 April 2023.