'The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm'

The record

‘The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm’ is the mini album Red Velvet released on 21 March 2022, six tracks led by ‘Feel My Rhythm’. It brings back the name of the trilogy the group put out in 2019, three years later, and follows Queendom by seven months.

The album introduction on Bugs says the title track samples Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ and lays a delicate string melody over a hard trap beat. The same text presents the other five as an R&B pop dance track, ‘Rainbow Halo’; an old-school R&B pop dance track, ‘Beg For Me’; a retro pop dance song whose title is the Spanish word for swaying, ‘BAMBOLEO’; a mid-tempo R&B song, ‘Good, Bad, Ugly’; and a slow R&B ballad, ‘In My Dreams’.

Reviews

Pitchfork’s Zhenzhen Yu set the title track beside the group’s best-known work. She wrote that “bold and stylish, ‘Feel My Rhythm’ is one of Red Velvet’s finest title tracks”, and that it is “reminiscent of the elegant darkness of their 2019 hit ‘Psycho’” — the title song of ‘The ReVe Festival’ Finale — “based on a wistful sample of Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ layered with a clangorous EDM trap beat”. What she takes as the point is not the collision itself: “But the song’s frisson isn’t based on the shallow spectacle of the two genres’ contrast. Instead, ‘Feel My Rhythm’’s contradictions serve to elevate the harmony.”

Chase McMullen of Beats Per Minute summed the record up this way: “In short, The ReVe Festival 2022 – Feel My Rhythm finds Red Velvet showing off just about every side of their artistry, confidently swinging big right in the directions they know serve them best.” He called it “a course meant to be savored, not some quick snack”.

IZM’s Kim Seong-uk picked out the season the record draws. He wrote that “the festival is in truth closer to a picnic in green spring than to the heat of early summer”, and that “‘Feel my rhythm’, which borrows ‘Air on the G String’, crosses time and space, down to a music video paying homage to paintings of centuries ago”. The same outlet’s year-end piece on 2022 wrote that Red Velvet led that year’s run of classical sampling with the song.

Among the tracks

The song three outlets put forward together is the closing ‘In My Dreams’. IZM wrote that “‘In my dreams’ finishes the festival beautifully”, and that “the blend of voices, their highs and lows smoothed out, opens a sense of space and leaves a soft, dreamlike trace”. Beats Per Minute called it a song that “ranks among the group’s most genuinely moving songs to date, getting an incredible amount of mileage out of a simple sentiment: ‘In my dreams you love me back.’” Pitchfork called it “the luxurious, balmy closer”.

‘Rainbow Halo’ is the track the album introduction describes as an R&B pop dance song setting restrained claps and a soft bell sound over a groovy bass. IZM wrote that “‘Rainbow halo’, a dance-pop number with a striking saxophone touch, draws the season of new green”. In the 127-song retrospective NME published for the group’s tenth anniversary on 1 August 2024, Tássia Assis called it “a shimmering treasure” whose “paced drums and bell-like synths create a magical atmosphere”. What she puts at the end is “a snappy, stylish sax outro”.

Of ‘BAMBOLEO’ Pitchfork wrote that “the sauntering ‘BAMBOLEO’ plays at a five-pronged intersection of nations”, explaining that its title likely comes from a Spanish-language song by a French band, that its K-pop melody is ornamented with Japanese city pop, and that its hook is declared in English. IZM wrote of the same song that “‘Bamboleo’, in the manner of AOR, draws a wide open plain”.

Afterwards

Eight months later ‘The ReVe Festival 2022 - Birthday’ arrived as the second chapter of the same series, and it sampled a classical piece too.