Clé 2 : Yellow Wood

The record

Clé 2 : Yellow Wood is the fifth mini album Stray Kids released on 19 June 2019. It carries seven tracks, the title track is ‘Side Effects’, and it is the second record in the Clé series. Where Clé 1 : MIROH, three months earlier, was the story of walking into the maze, this one is about what was waiting inside it.

The album introduction on Bugs presents the record as a special album, and says that the group who entered the maze on confidence now choose “the road no one has walked, which they have to open themselves, instead of the safe and easy one”, and so arrive in a space called Yellow Wood. The doubt and confusion that choice produces is what the record calls its side effects, the same text says: the title track works that confusion into the line about a headache and sets it over the heavy drop of psychedelic trance. The intro ‘Road Not Taken’ is a trance-based dance track carrying the will not to stop even while lost, and ‘TMT’ is a hip-hop song about the unease of trouble already in front of you. The record also gathers, for the first time in one place, the four Mixtape tracks the group had until then released only on CD.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) put a line from the title track on its list of the most striking lyrics of 2019. What Seukwip chose was the five syllables at the centre of the chorus. He described the place they arrive in: “A beat switch that numbs the senses. A dying scream. And then the five syllables that burst out.” Then: “There will be no phrase that could replace this bottomless punchline.” He closed the entry with a question: “Has there ever been a lyric that reached this degree of union with its track?”

Sara Conway of Clash put the same song among the group’s eight essential deep cuts in 2025. “When life gets overwhelming, ‘Side Effects’ (from the 2019 EP ‘Clé 2: Yellow Wood’) is an effective way to silence the thoughts in your head”, she wrote, and immediately added: “Well, they don’t really have a choice because this song is loud, chaotic and may even cause a headache or two.” On the sound: “A crash of drums akin to a roll of thunder plunges listeners straight into Stray Kids’ never-ending well of doubt, exhaustion and fear. In the chorus, detached robotic voices list side effects like one might read on a medication’s label over a pounding beat.”

Among the tracks

Conway read the title track back into the album title. “‘Side Effects’ pours forth as the members release all of their emotions into the track”, she wrote, and the questions they ask point at the name of the record: “The questions Stray Kids ask underscore the EP’s title, ‘Yellow Wood’. A reference to Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘The Road Not Taken,’ the group grapples with the chaotic emotions that come before taking the road ‘less traveled by’.”

That poem’s title is on the record too. ‘Road Not Taken’ is the official English title the label gives the opening track in its own distribution metadata. The Bugs introduction describes it as a trance-based dance track built on rising tension, in which lyrics about pushing on through the fork in the maze meet a beat that keeps the tension up.