Candy

The record

Candy is NCT DREAM’s winter special mini-album, released on 16 December 2022 with six tracks. The title track shares the record’s name. It was the group’s third new release of 2022, after the second full-length album Glitch Mode in March and its repackage Beatbox in May.

‘Candy’ is a remake of the song of the same name that H.O.T. put on their first album in 1996. The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, says the arrangement adds a cooler, crisper feel to the original’s bright melody, and names KENZIE as the arranger. The same text introduces the other five: ‘Graduation’, an R&B pop track; ‘Tangerine Love (Favorite)’, retro synth-pop; ‘Take My Breath’, a mid-tempo pop song; ‘Moon’, a winter ballad; and ‘Walk With You’, a pop dance track.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the record on 7 February 2023 in ‘Monthly : 2022년 11, 12월 – 앨범’, its column on the albums of November and December 2022. The writer Quibi noted that the group’s firmer identity shows precisely where the sense of duty towards the so-called “neo” project has been set aside, and called this winter record “the best example of that”. He closed: “A safe choice, but never a complacent one — an album that goes past being a season release and consolidates the group’s identity.”

Among the tracks

Of the title track Quibi wrote: “The title song, a remake of a certified first-generation K-pop classic with little variation, packs the members’ appeal in tightly through an even distribution of parts.” He went on to describe the vocalists crossing over one another on the melody to build the chemistry between them, and the rap members adding weight to the performance with a sturdy, old-fashioned flow, before writing that with the ambition of the concept pared back the members come into focus more sharply, so that “you feel how the heart of idol-pop lies, in the end, in the idols themselves”.

On the rest of the record he wrote that the songs, which fold the tenderness of winter and the year’s end into several styles, hold “a steadiness that is delicate without being fragile”. As the album introduction sets out, ‘Graduation’ is the R&B pop track KENZIE co-wrote, and ‘Moon’ is the winter ballad that lays a feeling for someone over a door and the moon at once.

Around it

The next new release was the third full-length album, ISTJ, on 17 July 2023.