Golden Age

The record

Golden Age is NCT’s fourth full-length album, released on 28 August 2023 with ten tracks. The two title tracks are ‘Baggy Jeans’ and ‘Golden Age’. Twenty members from NCT 127, NCT DREAM and WayV take part, and the record came one year and eight months after the third full-length album, Universe.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, describes the first title track, ‘Baggy Jeans’, as a hip-hop dance track on which the members’ voices open out over a weighted bassline, minimal drums and a hazily textured synthesiser, performed by Taeyong, Doyoung, Ten, Jaehyun and Mark. The same text notes that this is the first time the five have worked together since NCT U’s debut song ‘The 7th Sense’ seven years earlier. The second title track, ‘Golden Age’, quotes and reworks the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8, the Pathétique, and sets a trap beat against the piano line, the introduction says.

Reviews

NME’s Rhian Daly reviewed the album three days after release, on 31 August 2023. “Over the last seven years, NCT have become synonymous with bringing an experimental flair to K-pop and ‘Golden Age’ is no different,” the review says, and: “Across the album’s 10 tracks, the group largely avoid predictable moves to craft songs that keep you on your toes.” Later Daly wrote that “it’s hard to form a cohesive identity for your group when you have quite so many members and moving parts, yet ‘Golden Age’ feels distinctly NCT”.

Real Sound’s Mitsuko Ichioka wrote about the album on 3 September 2023. Ichioka wrote that the record “has been finished into a work with the pull that has you replaying the album over and over before you notice, through songs of many colours, sound made with precision down to the detail, and the members’ singing and rapping, which realise each song’s world completely”. The same piece said the songs, various in concept and colour, “have the power to keep a listener from tiring at all, even heard straight through to the end of the album, with their lean and simple construction and a refined sound calculated down to the detail”.

Among the tracks

The longest treatment of ‘Baggy Jeans’ is IZM’s. Park Su-jin reviewed the song on 1 September 2023, opening with “as ever, they have completed an aesthetics of sound as music” and writing that “a hip-hop base, a low and weighted synthesiser and electronic sound whose tension is adjusted to the breath come together exactly, and make an aural pleasure”. Of the concept Park wrote that “likening the group’s swagger to a pair of baggy jeans slipping down is apt too” and that “with a subject that is not difficult, it delivers a definite musical image”, before closing: “Once again they have shaped it well, and expressed it handsomely.” Daly took the same song as the proof of the album’s first seconds, writing that it “enters in a hush of throaty whispers and elastic bass whipping underneath coolly delivered lyrics dripping with swagger”.

Of the second title song Daly wrote that “the full group title track, meanwhile, lulls you into a false sense of security with its gentle piano intro, but quickly begins whipping back and forth between those soft melodies and a grinding, industrial-tinged backing”, and that the piano sections resting on Beethoven “only makes the composition more impressive”. Ichioka noted that the Pathétique itself drew argument in its own day for a construction unlike anything classical music had carried before, and read the song against that background as the announcement of a new chapter.

Daly named two more tracks. ‘The BAT’ “delves into hyperpop, positioning the collective as Batman cruising through the night in his Batmobile, setting the story to ominously noir instrumentals”. ‘Kangaroo’ “is much sunnier in both sound and subject”, the review says, with Taeil, Kun, Renjun, YangYang, Chenle and Jisung bouncing through a summer song. Ichioka picked out ‘Call D’, sung by Taeyong and Ten, for the telephone-like effects and synthesiser that take the listener’s ear, and ‘PADO’ for its jazzy piano, energetic rapping and soft vocals.

Around it

The album introduction places this record on top of the years in which NCT 127, NCT DREAM, NCT U and WayV have worked apart and together. The full-group album before it was Universe, from December 2021, and in the same year as this one WayV released their second full-length album, On My Youth.