Hello Future

The record

Hello Future is NCT DREAM’s repackage of their first full-length album, released on 28 June 2021 with thirteen tracks. The title track shares the record’s name. It adds ‘Hello Future’, ‘Bungee’ and ‘Life Is Still Going On’ to the ten songs of Hot Sauce, which had come out on 10 May that year.

Idology’s Quibi noted that the production team Moonshine wrote two of the three new songs, and counted that with the songs carried over “five of the album’s thirteen tracks are credited to Moonshine”. The same piece also records that ‘Hello Future’, ‘Bungee’ and ‘Diggity’ are joint work between Moonshine and Kenzie.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record in ‘Monthly’, its column on the albums of June 2021, as Quibi’s piece. The writer read the pairing of Moonshine and the group as the key to this repackage: it “looks like the result of a good fit between Moonshine, who has turned out a run of odd and lively tracks since arriving in K-pop with Red Velvet’s ‘Peek-A-Boo’, and NCT Dream, who are gathered around a clear energy”. Of Moonshine and Kenzie together, the same piece says the pair “boast an excellent fit that doubles each other’s quirkiness, in the writing and in the lyrics alike”.

The same writer set down where the group’s identity now sits — “the present, in which the group’s identity, once tied to being in their teens, has been reworked into the image of a boy who never grows up” — and closed: “Every element around the song and the album is in harmony, and there is nothing lacking in putting it forward as textbook K-pop.”

Rhian Daly of NME, in a review published on 1 July 2021, called the repackage “a generous second helping” and wrote that its three songs “flesh out the group’s sound even more”. Noting that a repackage in K-pop conventionally gets less promotion than the album it spins off from, the review adds: “it feels audacious of SM’s most youthful contingent to return with a repackage that possesses a title track stronger than ‘Hot Sauce’”.

Among the tracks

The title track ‘Hello Future’ is the one Daly spent longest on. The review calls it “a gleaming juggernaut of a song that encapsulates all sides of the seven-member group and then sends them soaring off into the stratosphere”, and says: “It’s hopeful and youthful.” The same piece finds “a subtle experimentalism” in it, dialling back the wobble of the previous title track while still sprinkling offbeat granules into its layers, and reads the song as a statement of intent about what comes next.

The second track, ‘Bungee’, is the new song Daly singled out beside it. The review says it deals with throwing yourself into a new love and shaking off any trepidation about it, and describes it “swinging from minimal verses to a chorus that bounces like an elastic rope uncoiling and rebounding back on itself”. Quibi named the same song as Moonshine and Kenzie’s joint work and called the pairing ideally suited to drawing the group’s “absurd imagining”.

Afterwards

Quibi wrote that the mood of the repackage matched “a visual like a technicolour hippie concept and a teenage science-fiction spy story”. The group’s second full-length album, Glitch Mode, followed nine months later, on 28 March 2022.