Dearest

The record

Dearest is RESCENE’s second single album, released on 2 July 2025 at 6 p.m. KST. It has two songs: the title track ‘Deja Vu’ and ‘Mood’. The album introduction reads the title as the word for the person one holds dearest, and presents the record as the group’s wish to stay in someone’s memory for a long time.

The scent

The Korean press described this record’s fragrance as fresh grass, in keeping with the group’s scent concept. The album introduction likens the record’s lingering note to the smell of wet grass that spreads after the rain has stopped.

Reviews

Nam Kang-min opened his IZM review with the season the record sits in: “a summer filled with a deepened sensibility is full of the smell of grass.” The same piece wrote of the title track’s sound that “the heat came early, so the warmth of the retro beat and the dreamy synthesiser might well have felt hot, but a spirited vocal and a sound glittering like a deja vu cooled it down cleanly”, and of the words that “the analogue lyrics, filled with description and repetition over a tempo that is not slow, draw out the pale-green memory of a first love.” He called the record’s approach “a head-on method that leads with an olfactory empathy of feeling, in the form most their own”.

Writing for Idology the following year, Binunmul (비눈물) looked back at this record’s title track as “‘Deja Vu’, which showed a lyrical, retro, analogue sensibility”, and noted that the same sensibility is “reinterpreted as the bleakness of a somewhat faded ashen forest” on the next song.

Among the tracks

The title track, ‘Deja Vu’, also carries what the record went on to earn: Sports Kyunghyang reported on 31 October 2025 that the song had been chosen for the peak K-pop single category of QQ Music’s third-quarter peak chart in China. The second song, ‘Mood’, was released as audio only, with no music video of its own.

What happened

Idology named ‘Deja Vu’ an honourable mention in its 20 best songs of 2025.