Ice Cream Cake

The record

Ice Cream Cake is Red Velvet’s first mini album, released on 17 March 2015 with six tracks. ‘Ice Cream Cake’ and ‘Automatic’ are the two title tracks. It is the first record made after Yeri joined and the group became five.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, describes the title track as electronic pop marked by a music-box sound and ‘Automatic’ as an urban track laying a soft melody over a groove-led drum beat, and says the new member was meant to widen what the group could take on musically.

Reviews

Kim Do-heon of IZM wrote that the record’s music, which mixes the R&B of nineties women singers with the electro-pop of its own moment, “is better than expected”, and that “the music can hold its own without appealing to fandom or expectation”. He pointed to the alluring quality running quietly through the album as the element that sets the group apart.

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as five writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of mid-March 2015. Mimyo wrote that “it is hard to deny that this is new, and that it is an evolved form made by human hands out of a foretold future”, closing his note with one word: new. MRJ called the title track “very convincing, and admirable in the way it pushes the boundary between K-pop and pop”, adding that it is “a highly dynamic track, with striking phrases and section joins, and quite interesting chord progressions and vocal harmonies”.

Four writers covered the record in weiv’s new-release column on 26 March 2015. Choi Seong-uk wrote that “the elements of the sound lock together without friction, the melodies move smoothly, and every single holds a certain level of quality”, and Seong Hyo-seon wrote that “the songs are graceful, as one expects of SM, which always produces work above a given standard, and the title song catches the ear more than anything else I have heard lately”.

Among the tracks

The title track is also the subject of a separate analysis Idology’s Mimyo published on 25 March 2015. Calling it “a distinctive song in several ways”, he wrote that “a music-box melody rings out clear while a beat crushed with distortion drives at it”, and traced the modulation that carries the chorus from A major into B major. Kim Do-heon of IZM wrote that the same track “crosses a bright melodic line blooming inside contradiction with a furtive lyric, never pausing, and for all its headlong speed it handles its own pacing well in the chorus”. Tássia Assis of NME placed it 20th in the 127-song retrospective the outlet published on 1 August 2024, calling it “creepy”, “sweet” and “quintessentially them”.

‘Automatic’, the other title track, is the track weiv chose for its 2015 songs of the year. Lee Seon-yeop wrote there that it takes on “a nineties R&B vibe recalling Janet Jackson or Aaliyah” and that within its repeating lyric and melody the group reach a clean balance through harmony and the division of parts, with no one voice pushed forward. Assis placed the song 11th in her retrospective and wrote that it is “crazy to think that just one year into debut, Red Velvet were already this impressive”.

The writer who spent longest on ‘Somethin Kinda Crazy’ is Idology’s Masitneun Pahita. Saying at the outset that he would use his whole note on that one track, he wrote that “the feeling of pop at its most lavish is alive in this song just as it was”, and closed: “I will say plainly that a girl-group song this straight down the middle will not be easy to find again.” Kim Do-heon pointed to the same track, made with Kenzie and Teddy Riley, as modern R&B.

Afterwards

The first full-length album The Red followed six months later, and the velvet line of this record ran on into The Velvet the following year.