FIRST 'LOVE&LETTER'

The record

FIRST ‘LOVE&LETTER’ is SEVENTEEN’s first full-length album, released on 25 April 2016 with ten tracks. The title track is ‘Pretty U’. Three unit versions close the record: the vocal team take the debut single ‘Adore U’, the hip-hop team take ‘Mansae’ from BOYS BE, and the performance team take ‘Shining Diamond’ from the debut mini album.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in ‘1st Listen’, its round-up of new releases from late April 2016, as short pieces by three critics. Mimyo read the album as one on which SEVENTEEN “seem to have come down markedly into the real world”, writing that “expressions that circulate online turn up often in the lyrics, and the music itself carries more ballad and more hip-hop”. He wrote that “that adjustment does much of the work in making the flow of the whole album far smoother”, and closed: “at this level, SEVENTEEN’s change of course can fairly be called a musical success.”

Yu Je-sang picked the record as that issue’s ‘Pick!’. He wrote that he “was surprised at how cleanly the songs are put together”, and called the title track one “in which Pharrell or M-flo or references of that kind mix well with Korean pop, and the result could not be more enjoyable”.

Haemcha wrote: “To carry a whole album along without ever growing dull, on lightness and softness alone and without straining or turning solemn — listening to SEVENTEEN’s first full-length album, I found myself thinking backwards about where boy groups in general have got to.” He wrote that the record “builds so consistent a world inside one album that you cannot help agreeing”, and added of the three unit versions that “arranging them into new versions so they can be enjoyed as songs quite different from the originals is fresh too”.

Among the tracks

‘Pretty U’ is the song The Korea Herald’s Kwon Yae-rim placed fourth when she ranked SEVENTEEN’s thirty best songs in July 2020. She wrote that it is “effusive and buoyant” and “showcases the act’s softer side with romantic lyrics and upbeat melodies”.

The track Mimyo found most striking on the record is ‘Hit Song’. He wrote that it is a song “in which the writer and the speaker are one and the same” — “a device rare in idol pop but well used in ballads, which aims at once for the distinctness of an idol who writes his own songs and for the feeling of Korean pop, while catching the flutter of idol music too”. The same piece added that it is “the most composite and the most complex in structure” on the album. The label ships English titles for the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘예쁘다’ is Pretty U, ‘엄지척’ is Chuck, ‘유행가’ is Hit Song and ‘사랑쪽지’ is Love Letter.