COLOR

The record

COLOR is NCT WISH’s third mini album, released on 1 September 2025 with seven tracks. The title track shares the record’s name.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, sums the record up in the line “Bring out the color”, and says it carries the group’s intent to fill the world with a colour of its own.

Reviews

Real Sound, the Japanese music site, took the title track as one of the week’s six records in its new-release review column ‘New Releases In Focus’ on 5 September 2025. Eriko Ishii picked up the label’s line about dyeing the world in many colours and wrote that this one song alone leaves the listener overwhelmed by a richness of colour not easily put into words. The song’s basic tone is pastel, as the video’s is, she wrote, and the track, changing every few bars, avoids flat repetition and swaps its backdrop one scene at a time.

What Ishii called the important thing is the treatment of the voices in the chorus. She wrote that a unison take appears to have been layered again and put through modulation, and that the chorus falling like a shower of light feels wonderful.

The record’s place in the group’s own line was set out by Kwibi of Idology (아이돌로지). Reviewing Ode to Love on 12 May 2026, he wrote that that album’s ‘2.0 (TWO POINT O)’ follows naturally from “‘COLOR’, the preceding title song, which put its weight on performance”.

Among the tracks

Both pieces point at the title track. Ishii took its colour and the treatment of its chorus as the record’s marker, while Kwibi read it as a title track weighted toward performance and saw the first full-length album pick that line up. In the same review Kwibi also named this record’s closing track ‘Reel-ationship’, writing that the mood of ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ on the later album had already been shown there.

Numbers

The Bugs album introduction to the following record, Ode to Love, states that this album was the group’s second million seller.

Around it

Some seven months later, on 20 April 2026, the first full-length album Ode to Love followed.