from our Memento Box

The record

from our Memento Box is the fifth mini album by fromis_9, released on 27 June 2022. It carries five tracks, and the title track is the second of them, ‘Stay This Way’. It came five months after Midnight Guest, the group’s second record of that year, and it is the last mini album of the nine-member line-up.

The album introduction on Bugs says the title means the moments the members have shared, kept in a memento box, and that each track is tied to an object standing for a summer memory. The title track follows an unplanned trip taken at sunset, and it leads with a funky bass and guitar. The same text credits Baek Ji-heon with a share of the lyrics on the first track, ‘Up And’, and names the producer Slow Rabbit and the singer-songwriter ADORA as contributors to the third, ‘Blind Letter’. The title track’s music video was shot in Saipan.

Reviews

Idology’s Binunmul took up the record in the webzine’s round-up of June 2022 albums. He read it as carrying forward the shape of the previous mini album, writing: “The alluring concept of ‘Escape Room’ carries over into ‘Rewind’, and the particular brightness and range of colour (‘Hush Hush’) into ‘Cheese’ and ‘Up And’.” What had changed, he wrote, was the vocal direction: “Unlike the past, where the voices were adjusted to fit a frame set inside the song, a track like ‘Blind Letter’ lets each singer show her technique and character without limit, and the new approach puts the focus on how much the members’ singing has matured.”

The same piece placed the record at the close of a period. “Since ‘Feel Good’, fromis_9 have built fictional worlds that turn inward with the times — a trip over Zoom, a secret party,” he wrote, “and with this album they draw a reality that is shut in nowhere and radiates outward freely, bringing both the travel theme and one musical chapter to an end.” He closed: “With the legacy they have built up over many attempts and the thick support they hold now as their ground, fromis_9 will change more boldly still, and I quietly expect they will succeed at it as deftly as before.”

Among the tracks

Of the title track ‘Stay This Way’, Idology described the key change after the bridge and the sing-along part late in the song as the way the record fills in the depth of its structure, and wrote that a larger share of falsetto moves the small-hours feeling of the previous record into the ease of a summer evening.

The piece names three other tracks. The third, ‘Blind Letter’, is its example of vocal direction that lets a singer’s technique and character through without limit; the closing ‘Rewind’, the fourth track ‘Cheese’ and the opening ‘Up And’ are treated as the places where ‘Escape Room’ and ‘Hush Hush’ from Midnight Guest are carried on.

Numbers

The Korea Herald reported first-week sales of 138,100 copies for the mini album and called that the group’s all-time high at the time. By the same report the title track ‘Stay This Way’ took five trophies on Korean television music shows. Idology wrote that the group reached its first win on a terrestrial music show in this record’s promotion cycle.