Al1

The record

Al1 is SEVENTEEN’s fourth mini album, released on 22 May 2017. The title track is ‘Don’t Wanna Cry’. The album introduction on Bugs describes a record about the members’ struggles and their friendship. Two tracks are missing from the list above: the album’s information page withholds their titles. It is also the first time a SEVENTEEN title track took up a parting.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in ‘1st Listen’, its round-up of new releases from late May 2017, as short pieces by five critics. Mimyo read SEVENTEEN at this point as “in the middle of pursuing a kind of ‘crossbred Korean pop’ — putting a hybrid into the more traditional aesthetics of Korean pop and turning it into something new”. He wrote that “in that sense the ‘attitude’ of the B-sides catches the eye”, and picked out three of them in turn.

Haemcha wrote that “across the songs there is a common image, more quietly settled than before, and at the same time each song has a clear character of its own”. Park Hee-a called the title track one “that seems to declare Woozi will go on being a songmaker worth watching”, and O-yo wrote that “listening to ‘Don’t Wanna Cry’ you become certain once again that Woozi is a good songwriter”.

IZM made the record its Monthly Pick for May 2017. Jeong Yu-na’s short piece begins: “I could not lie to myself.”

Billboard, writing in its year-end list, said the “13-member boy band has always been known for experimenting with different sounds, and their Al1 EP ended up crafting some of K-pop’s most impressive electronic cuts of the year”.

Among the tracks

Of the title track Park Hee-a wrote that “from the opening to the close it builds a melody and a flow that never stick out, and pours all its strength into the plain refrain ‘I don’t want to cry’”. O-yo picked out “the sense in placing a rap at the climax against expectation”. The Korea Herald’s Kwon Yae-rim placed the song sixth when she ranked SEVENTEEN’s thirty best songs in July 2020.

Mimyo picked out three B-sides. He called ‘IF I’ “attractive, a fluent R&B running while muted guitars and pads hold a great deal of dark weight”, and wrote that “‘Swimming Fool’, which extracts a grown-up groove from deep house, and ‘Habit’, whose poise stands out, are worth attention too”. Billboard wrote that “the whistle hook-heavy ‘Swimming Fool’ and the tribal-influenced ‘My I’ show they can successfully integrate into other sides of a genre and think of music in multidimensional ways”. Kwon placed ‘Swimming Fool’ nineteenth on her list, writing that the performance unit’s song “puts a refreshing spin on the classic summer dance track”.

Numbers

Billboard placed the record eighteenth in ‘20 Best K-pop Albums of 2017’, published on 14 December 2017. The label ships English titles for the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘울고 싶지 않아’ is Don’t Wanna Cry and ‘입버릇’ is Habit.