Go Back To The Future

The record

Go Back To The Future is NCT DREAM’s fifth full-length album, released on 14 July 2025 with nine tracks. The double title tracks are ‘BTTF’ and ‘CHILLER’. It follows the fourth full-length album, DREAMSCAPE, by eight months.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, sets the record out as a time-travel story in search of one’s most luminous self, and divides its world into the past of 2016, the group’s debut year, the present of 2025, and an “absolute present” long after that. The same text says ‘BTTF’ stands for ‘Back To The Future’ and that ‘CHILLER’ works as both a prequel and a sequel to it; KENZIE wrote the lyrics for both. By that text the music video for ‘BTTF’ pays homage to the film Back to the Future, with formal approval obtained from the rights holders, Amblin Entertainment and Universal Studios among them.

Reviews

Shin Dong-gyu of IZM took ‘CHILLER’ in a single review published on 27 July 2025. He wrote that “‘Chiller’, the title song of Go Back To The Future — the fifth studio album, arriving eight months after Dreamscape, which concentrated on volume at the level of the record — turns the heat of the moment into fun, exactly as its name says”, and added: “What is striking is the members, who take in the whole span between high and low.”

He closed the piece: “This is music in which the seasoned side of Kenzie and NCT DREAM stands tall, making the fullest use of what each piece is good for.”

Among the tracks

The same review goes through how ‘CHILLER’ distributes its singing. Shin wrote: “The vocals from Jaemin and Haechan scattered across the opening are recovered under the name of weight, each borrowing its own fragment of the chorus, and Mark’s rapping, locked to the accent of the beat, holds a presence of its own between the ebb and flow of the singing.” He went on: “As if the premise were ‘the same grain, a different tone’, the parts traded back and forth or sung in pairs run on one after another, and out of constantly shifting gears comes even a sense of steadiness.”

The other title track, ‘BTTF’, is placed by the album introduction. By that text it is about gaining the power to change the future through time travel and then realising there is nothing to regret in the road already walked, so that the thing to do is return to the brightest future; the chant that says “we are the future” carries that resolve. Its music video went up on 8 July, six days before the release.

Around it

The sixth mini-album, Beat It Up, followed four months later, on 17 November 2025.