GOLDEN HOUR : Part.2

The record

GOLDEN HOUR : Part.2 is the eleventh mini album ATEEZ released, on 15 November 2024, with six tracks. The title track is ‘Ice On My Teeth’, and the record is the second in the series that began six months earlier with GOLDEN HOUR : Part.1.

The album introduction carried by Bugs takes love as this chapter’s subject, and says that for the group love is “the process of finding a whole self, and a way of living”. The same text starts the story at “boys who had been living busily, each chasing the reality he chose, gathered again in one place”, and puts the choice between “settling into reality, or taking the challenge again” in front of them there. The record followed a 2024 world tour through ten North American cities, which the introduction puts at more than 200,000 people.

Reviews

Billboard put the title track, ‘Ice on My Teeth’, on its list of the 25 best K-pop songs of 2024, dated 7 December 2024. The entry says that “while ATEEZ has long been a standard of excellence in K-pop maximalism, ‘Ice on My Teeth’ is their brilliant pivot to deliver the same punch with pulled-back subtlety”.

The same entry describes the sound as “a string-speckled trap beat” backing the group as they step “into well-earned, braggadocio power”. Billboard notes that the group started in 2018 as “an underdog talent from one of K-pop’s medium-sized agencies in KQ Entertainment” and have been proving themselves since, and closes: “despite the ease it delivers, ‘Ice on My Teeth’ is a well-earned party.”

Among the tracks

The title track takes its name, as the album introduction sets out, from the image of “a well-cut suit, this diamond set in a tooth”, and the introduction names the song’s grain as “rawness laid over the classic”. Billboard notes how the lyric turns a familiar hip-hop boast around, giving as its example the line about buying diamonds at the dentist rather than showing off a grill.

The opening track, ‘DEEP DIVE’, is described in the introduction as starting from the drop between “a city full of brilliant lights” and the moment “every light goes out and silence wraps it”, and diving inward from there. ‘Man on Fire’ is love as a state one does not recognise “until it burns and burns and turns to ash”, and ‘Selfish Waltz’ a relationship where “the crack opens again in a dance called forgetting, and nobody has any intention of matching the step that has gone wrong”.

Numbers

The album introduction for the next record, GOLDEN HOUR : Part.3, says this one reached number one on the Billboard 200 — the group’s second — and passed its own previous best for first-week album sales in the United States. The same text says it reached number four on the UK Official Albums Chart, which made the group the first K-pop act to place three albums in that chart’s top five inside a year. Billboard also called it the group’s second number-one album on the Billboard 200 in its year-end entry.

What came next

The GOLDEN HOUR series continues with GOLDEN HOUR : Part.3. The order of the series and the line-up are set out in Who Are ATEEZ?.