헹가래 (Heng:garæ)

The record

Heng:garæ is SEVENTEEN’s seventh mini album, released on 22 June 2020 with six tracks. The title track is ‘Left & Right’. It arrived nine months after the third full-length album An Ode.

The album introduction on Bugs explains that 헹가래 is a native Korean word for the act of a group throwing one person into the air and catching them, and says the record likens that motion to the will of the young to lift themselves when they cannot find their own way. The same text places the record after An Ode, as a step out of the fear that album faced and back toward a dream, and says the opening track ‘Fearless’ carries the story over by showing the group free of that fear. The title track is described as a 2000s hip-hop form rebuilt in the sound of 2020.

Reviews

IZM’s Jang Jun-hwan reviewed the title track in July 2020. He wrote that ‘Left & Right’ “is like an unpredictable adolescent boy”, and that it “deliberately plays capricious — shaking the tempo, dropping separate sound effects in here and there”. The same piece added that “the tightrope-walking progression, and a performance restrained to spare the eye, come forward instead and make it tantalising”, and closed by calling the song “a rather interesting evolution”.

Among the tracks

What IZM singled out is how the title track is built. Jang Jun-hwan saw its “structure that builds step by step and then abruptly turns calm” as close to an earlier single, but wrote that blending in the group’s own airiness won the technique some persuasive force. His opening line was that the song is “unhurried and sly”.

The album introduction accounts for the other five tracks. The third, ‘I Wish’, is a mid-tempo ballad of brass and vocals whose lyric holds the one feeling that could not turn green in a green spring. ‘My My’, released ahead of the album with the trailer, carries the members’ own story; ‘Kidult’ offers comfort to the young; and the closing ‘Together’ sets down what it means to go somewhere with someone. Woozi led the writing and composition with the other members, and Vernon and S.Coups took a larger share than on the previous album, the same text says.

Numbers

iMBC Entertainment, citing the Hanteo Chart, reported first-week sales (초동) of 1,097,891 copies and a number-one placing on the weekly album chart for the counting period of 22 to 28 June 2020. It was SEVENTEEN’s first million-selling record. The mark had in fact been passed before that count closed — OSEN reported that sales had gone over 1.01 million by noon on 26 June, the fifth day after release.