BOYS BE

The record

BOYS BE is SEVENTEEN’s second mini album, released on 10 September 2015 with five tracks. The title track is ‘Mansae’. It arrived four months after the debut 17 CARAT, and the album introduction on Bugs sets the record among schoolboys and their crushes.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in ‘1st Listen’, its round-up of new releases from early September 2015, as short pieces by five critics. Kim Yun-ha wrote that “on a base of firm, tidy beats, the knack for gathering up a fairly wide span of genres — pop, hip-hop, EDM — as though it were nothing and handing the lot over into the territory of Korean pop is out of the ordinary”, and closed: “through these songs, at last, it feels as though the boys are back.”

Kim Young-dae read the record as “bubblegum pop that leads with funk and sweetness” and wrote that “as a direction it is a good one”. He also wrote that “the focus on a range of genres and on showing each member’s many sides is a success”. Masitneun Pahita wrote that “the songs are full of young energy, and the many characters set against a school backdrop pull it towards the imagination of a genre”.

Doldolmalling picked the record as that issue’s ‘Pick!’. He wrote that “large rookie groups have been appearing one after another lately, and among them SEVENTEEN plainly stands out”, and gave as his reason the sense in laying a lyric that calls out “Wait, girl!” over the major-key chord progression of the chorus.

Among the tracks

Of the title track Kim Young-dae wrote that it is “funky dance pop whose hook melody and lyric stick to the mouth exactly as they should”. The Korea Herald’s Kwon Yae-rim placed it eighth when she ranked SEVENTEEN’s thirty best songs in July 2020, writing that “‘Mansae’ in Korean means ‘hooray,’ and the band uses the word to shout the love they have for their crush and say how they just want to ‘mansae’ when they look at them”.

On the same Idology page Kim Young-dae picked out the mid-tempo vocal pop of ‘When I Grow Up’ and the trap-flavoured hip-hop track ‘OMG’, writing that “as a boy-group mini album it has more or less assembled both the range and the quality”. Kim Yun-ha wrote of ‘When I Grow Up’ that “the ticklish confession of a boy is warm too”. Jo Seong-min, on a record where three of the five tracks are unit songs, wrote that SEVENTEEN treat a large-cast stage as a matter “not of ‘how many people go where and how’ but of ‘it does not matter how many there are, the whole picture should be lovely’”.

Numbers

weiv listed ‘Mansae’ among the tracks its critics chose for 2015 in its year-end round-up. The label ships English titles for the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘만세’ is Mansae, ‘표정관리’ is Fronting and ‘어른이 되면’ is When I Grow Up.