Beatbox

The record

Beatbox is the repackage of NCT DREAM’s second full-length album, released on 30 May 2022 with fifteen tracks. It carries the eleven songs of Glitch Mode, out two months earlier, and adds four new ones. The title track is ‘Beatbox’.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, describes the title track as an old-school hip-hop dance track built on beatboxing, with a lyric about making the music only this group can make. The same text introduces the four new songs: ‘To My First’, an R&B pop track continuing the first-love series the group has kept up since its debut; ‘Sorry, Heart’, an R&B ballad sung by Renjun, Haechan and Chenle; ‘Fire Alarm’, led by a clap sample; and ‘On the way’, the R&B pop track that closes the record.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the title track on 15 June 2022 in ‘Monthly : 2022년 5월 – 싱글’, its column on the month’s singles, where it was one of three records discussed. The writer Quibi opened with the concept images — “the concept images, which call to mind classic Anglo-American boy bands like New Edition at a stroke, catch the eye” — and wrote of the song itself: “‘Beatbox’, which inherits the vivid boyish imagery that has stayed a permanent classic, realises to perfection the identity of an NCT DREAM rebooted as ‘eternal boys’.”

Among the tracks

The same note goes through the title track’s materials one at a time. Quibi lists the rough beatboxing pushed to the front of the chorus, the rhyming that threads compatibility into ‘Beatbox’ and on into music, and the old-fashioned movement in the last stretch, and writes that the ad-lib lines from Haechan and Renjun carry the song’s freshness. He then points to the weight of the kick, the plainness of the flow and the strength the choreography asks for as the mark of a group in its seventh year, closing: “What is remarkable is the way they keep drawing a rich listen out of a plain slogan like ‘boys’ — one that could easily have run thin — and secure the essence of the group in the process.”

The four new songs are the ones the album introduction places for the listener. ‘To My First’ extends the first-love series; ‘Sorry, Heart’ is the ballad the three vocalists sing; and ‘On the way’ closes the second album with a promise to keep walking the same road together.

Around it

The winter special mini-album Candy followed in December of the same year, and the next full-length, ISTJ, arrived one year and two months later, in July 2023.