I am YOU

The record

I am YOU is the third mini album Stray Kids released on 22 October 2018. ‘I am YOU’ is the title track, and the record closes the ‘I am’ series. It follows I am WHO by two and a half months.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record carries a message of hope: youth is unsteady, but the I grows through the you and takes from it the strength to overcome anything. The same text describes the title track as a hip-hop song written and composed by the in-house production team 3RACHA, built on a guitar line against a trap beat. It annotates the other tracks too: ‘My Side’ is addressed to the one who has always taken your side, saying it is my turn to be your strength; ‘Hero’s Soup’ is a hip-hop song the members wrote imagining their fathers eating the hangover soup of its title; and ‘N/S’ is a hip-hop track about always choosing one pole or the other with nothing in between. The closing track, ‘0325’, takes the group’s debut date as its title and was built by joining the intros of I am NOT, I am WHO and I am YOU into one song.

Reviews

Three critics took the record in Idology’s (아이돌로지) new-release column. Seodeu wrote of the title track that it has “the image of a song you might get if you stripped the band sound out of metal rap.” He added: “I had the impression before that this team’s identity would not be caught by hip-hop and dance alone, and perhaps for Stray Kids the appeal of a dance group and the appeal of a band are living side by side.” Listening again from the debut onward, he wrote, “the team’s colour and its strengths might come into sharper focus.”

Kwibi read what the record had recovered at the end of the series. Where the first two were fierce anguish, this one has “the feel of having brushed off the rebelliousness and fished up the lyricism.” Then he narrowed the group down to one thing: what he watches for “is precisely that youthful audacity”, and “the youthful audacity — or perhaps the audacious youthfulness — that realises hip-hop in the everyday language of adolescents is what looks like the point of difference between Stray Kids and other hip-hop idols.” He closed on the name: “perhaps the heart of the team name Stray Kids was never in the ‘stray’ but in the ‘kids’.”

Among the tracks

The song Kwibi used as his own worked example is ‘Get Cool’. “The follow-up single ‘Get Cool’ is the example that shows this plainly”, he wrote, and described it delivering the everyday speech of a real schoolboy without a trace of self-consciousness.

Abbie Aitken of Clash put ‘N/S’ on the group’s list of defining songs in 2023. “‘N/S (극과 극)’ is a song about two extremes”, she wrote. “The title translates to polar opposites, the lyrics talk of indecisiveness whilst simultaneously explaining how it is better to live on the outside rather than following the norm.” What makes it light-hearted, on her reading, is I.N’s playful delivery as he weighs whether he prefers his mother or his father. What has kept the song alive, she wrote, is the video: “The group walks around busy streets, each holding cameras and lip-syncing along to the track. It’s the low-budget, home-made aesthetic that fans relate to that makes the track so notorious.”

Sara Conway of Clash chose ‘My Side’ from the same record in 2025. “Through a delicate blend of lyricism, gentle yet strong vocals and emotional rap sections, ‘My Side’ showcases the best of Stray Kids’ strengths”, she wrote. She read the split between refrain and rapping as design: “Despite the division between the refrain and the rapping, it is clearly an intentional choice. Just as the group sings of longing to bring two sides together, they reflect this in the actual form of the song.” And she added: “Yet, Stray Kids still manage to surprise listeners with the song’s experimental outro.”