Born to be XX

The record

Born to be XX is the second mini album of KISS OF LIFE, released on 8 November 2023 with seven tracks. ‘Bad News’ and ‘Nobody Knows’ are the two title tracks. It came four months after the debut mini album KISS OF LIFE. S2 Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs says that where the debut spoke of a freedom won from outside pressure, this record uses the keyword ‘X’ to say that true freedom comes from within. The same text describes the ‘X’ the album claims as a special thing that is not made welcome, and says the two title tracks were set side by side — ‘Bad News’ built on a guitar riff, ‘Nobody Knows’ a soul and R&B track led by its beat — to show a subject of two faces from both directions. It also says several tracks were written or composed by the members, among them Belle’s ‘Says It’.

Reviews

IZM’s Im Dong-yeop opened his single review of the title track, published in November 2023, with the line “everything flows as naturally as water”. He set out how the song is built: “The guitar riff is stood up whole at the start and stamps in the character and the rhythm; then the vocal, the lead, arrives, and the guitar, its job done, seeps into the bass leaving only the texture of a plucked string.” He wrote that “the slightly empty feel of the sound makes you concentrate harder on the singing”, and pointed to the hip-hop quotations set through the lyric and the arrangement — the words for the American east and west coasts, a line taken from Beenzino’s ‘Profile’, the repeated part before the chorus, and the shouted female vocal late in the song.

The same piece read the record against the debut. He wrote that “KISS OF LIFE, who gave each member her own song on the first mini album Kiss Of Life, have come together properly here, as though they had gathered the materials of hip-hop into one place”, and that “rap, singing, sound, backing — not one of them sits apart, and it is smooth”.

Yemi, writing for Idology (아이돌로지), chose the record for the site’s 15 albums of 2023 in January 2024. He read it as a work showing the range of what the four who came together on the debut do well, and wrote that “the oddly vintage texture of a sound drawn from where twenty-first-century hip-hop, contemporary R&B and pop meet, joined to an image aimed at the 2000s, sketches something ‘hip’”. He added that “the members’ voices, which land with impact, show off their technique lightly and paint on that sketch the necessary element of a free spirit”.

After it

KISS OF LIFE followed this record with the first single album Midas Touch in April the next year, and the digital single Sticky that July. The group’s releases are set out on the KISS OF LIFE page.