DIMENSION : DILEMMA

The record

DIMENSION : DILEMMA is ENHYPEN’s first album, released on 12 October 2021 with eight tracks. The title track is ‘Tamed-Dashed’. It opens the DIMENSION series, which follows the BORDER records BORDER : DAY ONE and BORDER : CARNIVAL, and Yeonjun of TOMORROW X TOGETHER features on ‘Blockbuster’.

BELIFT LAB’s album introduction on Bugs says the series begins after the boys realise that the world they have entered is a new dimension, more tangled and more contradictory than they expected. The same text has them chasing desires that pull against each other until their sense of who they are comes loose, and then, faced with a dilemma in which nothing is easy to choose, deciding to do what they can do now and running forward. The title comes from the question the record asks: will you be tamed by desire, or dashed by it?

Reviews

Tanu I. Raj of NME gave the album four stars out of five on 15 October 2021. Raj wrote that the septet were quickly emerging “as not only one of the most exciting and conceptually rich acts of this generation, but also as one capable of wielding exceptional cohesion in their art”, and that the cohesion is shown nowhere better than on this first full-length. Over its eight tracks, the review says, ENHYPEN “not only race past musical constraints with thunderous velocity, but also move up a rung in maturity, going from jumping headlong into things to accounting for how their choices affect them”.

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record as two writers’ notes in its monthly column on the albums of October 2021. Mano wrote that “led by ‘Tamed-Dashed’, which a thick bass line drives, the record moves between several genres across a running time that is not long, with considerable skill in its pacing”. Simdyang read the album as a picture of a moment caught between two impossible options, like Odysseus having to pass between Scylla and Charybdis, and wrote that “the cool tone that sits with the clean, high-timbred vocal lines lets the members stand out where an excess of context had seemed to press them down”.

Among the tracks

Of the title song, Raj wrote that “holding the album together in enchanting gravity is the title track”, and that, “seeped in exciting, blood-pumping EDM-style synth bass, ‘Tamed-Dashed’ pulls one in with its dizzying intensity”. Raj wrote that the electro-funk of ‘Upper Side Dreamin’’ “turns the intensity of ‘Tamed-Dashed’ into a completely different, yet equally charming direction”, and that its chorus lulls the listener while a quiet admission of the fear of losing everything sits inside it.

The B-sides Raj spent longest on are ‘Blockbuster’ and ‘Attention, please!’. Raj called them the best two on the record, and wrote that ‘Blockbuster’, with Yeonjun, “comes marching in on a wave of pop rock and distorted guitar, quickly dissolving into powerful hip-hop beats”. Of ‘Attention, please!’ the review says that, breaking out the guitars and alt-rock, it is “a neat throwback to the early 2000s era of indie rock”. Idology’s Mano described the same song as one “whose intro guitar riff calls Nirvana to mind”, and read its place on the record as a sign that the group meant to keep the emo streak going.

Afterwards

The repackage DIMENSION : ANSWER followed three months later with three new songs and closed the DIMENSION series.