Fe3O4: BREAK

The record

Fe3O4: BREAK is NMIXX’s second mini album, released on 15 January 2024 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘DASH’, which JYP Entertainment’s album introduction describes as a MIXX POP track moving between old-school hip hop and pop punk. It came half a year after the single album A Midsummer NMIXX’s Dream. Fe3O4 is the chemical formula for magnetite, and two further mini albums carry the same name: Fe3O4: STICK OUT and Fe3O4: FORWARD. The second track, ‘Soñar (Breaker)’, was released ahead of the album in December 2023.

Reviews

IZM’s Han Seong-hyun wrote of the record that “< Fe3O4: Break > brings unexpected good news: it has found the level between conviction and musical finish”. He closed his last paragraph this way: “Having made out again the destination that had been hidden in the haze, they have at last found their momentum.” A month earlier, reviewing the pre-release track for the same outlet, Lee Hong-hyun wrote: “What is interesting is that it sounds like a single that gathers up every experiment so far and tunes them well.” He called it “a single that proves they are widening the branches and horizons of the mixing that is their own weapon, taking the results of their experiments as a database”.

Idology picked the record among its 16 K-pop albums of 2024. Squib, who wrote the entry, opened: “Since a debut that solemnly declared a genre called ‘MIXX POP’, NMIXX have at times been swung about by that cause and at times looked away from it, and only now do they seem to have established a sound worthy of the name.” Of the first half of the record he wrote that “the tracks in the album’s first half, which attempt a bold mix and match, keep offering irregular structures and crossings of genre while doggedly holding the songs’ pull with clear choruses”, and he closed the entry: “As K-pop synchronises with global pop, I give particular praise to their having held to music nobody would make anywhere but in K-pop.”

Billboard also placed the record among its 25 best K-pop albums of 2024. The entry, signed A.W., says: “It’s thankfully not a total revision of their unique sound, which is why this ‘NMIXX, change up’ sticks the landing.”

Among the tracks

IZM marked three tracks as recommended in the tracklist printed with its review — the opening ‘DASH’, the second track ‘Soñar (Breaker)’ and the closing ‘Break The Wall’. Of the title track the same piece wrote: “The structure, which turns most of the song into hook, resembles ‘Love me like this’, but by bringing out funk-based old-school hip-hop percussion it reduced the friction with the over-accented rap, and the short pop-punk bridge supplied both a pretext and a plausibility for the MIXX POP sign.”

NME placed ‘DASH’ twenty-first among its 25 best K-pop songs of 2024 on 11 December that year. The entry writes: “‘Dash’ never sounds like disparate songs being forced together, but a gorgeous blend where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It goes on: “The pre-chorus gives the group space to show off their vocal chops, the rap-like chorus is undeniably catchy and the rock-tinged bridge gives the song that special sauce.”

Billboard’s year-end entry read the record track by track: “Spread out over 20 minutes, this rollicking EP is a rollercoaster ride of country twang and rock (‘Run for Roses’), industrial hip-hop (‘BOOM’), pulsing Jersey club (‘Passionfruit’), delicate R&B (‘XOXO’) and more.” Of the pre-release ‘Soñar (Breaker)’, IZM’s Han Seong-hyun wrote that it is “the most striking pre-release single among everything they have put out so far”.

Numbers

Billboard reported that the mini album took NMIXX back to the top of its Emerging Artists chart dated 3 February 2024. By the same report the record entered the World Albums chart at number two and the Billboard 200 at number 171, with 8,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in its opening week of 19 to 25 January, according to Luminate. At the end of that year it appeared on Billboard’s 25 best K-pop albums and Idology’s 16 albums of the year.