IN生 (IN LIFE)

The record

IN生 (IN LIFE) is the repackage of the first full-length album, released by Stray Kids on 14 September 2020. It carries seventeen tracks and the title track is ‘Back Door’. Nine songs from GO生 (GO LIVE), three months earlier, stand at the back of it, with eight new ones in front.

The album introduction on Bugs runs the two record titles together in its own first line: “GO LIVE IN LIFE”. The same text presents ‘Back Door’ as “an invitation saying that if you want to keep enjoying the fun of ‘God’s Menu’, come in through the back door and join us”, and says a range of instruments, acoustic and synth, were used to make a festival atmosphere. On the performance it points at the tug-of-war choreography set to the first verse and the movement on the line about staff only beyond this point, at figures that recall the circle dance ganggangsullae, and at costumes that read traditional hanbok in a modern way. Of the eight new songs, the opener ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ is the full version of the first album’s intro track, and tracks six to eight are the three unit songs first performed at the group’s first solo concert, ‘District 9 : Unlock’. The same text records that earattack composed and arranged ‘B Me’, and that Tele, who produced Lizzo’s ‘Truth Hurts’, worked on ‘Any’.

Reviews

One outlet wrote about this record: Billboard’s twenty best K-pop songs of 2020, where the title track came tenth. The entry is signed with the initials M.M. only, and it opens by naming the sonic motif that ran through the year: “Is there a sonic motif that had as big a year in K-pop as The Funky Bassline?”

What the critic heard in this song is what was laid over it. “Co-produced by members Bang Chan, Changbin and Han, ‘Back Door’ welcomes you in with TFB and ensnares you with its cheeky on-the-nose door creaks, its cooly confident vocal performances, and a stomping, floor-filling EDM finale”, the entry reads. It closes on where the song moved the group’s sound: “On ‘Back Door,’ Stray Kids tighten their production without eschewing any exuberance, transforming their signature bombastic EDM into something more sophisticated.”

Numbers

The Korea Herald reported on 9 March 2026, citing the label, that the music video for ‘Back Door’ had passed 400 million views on YouTube. The same report said it was the group’s third video to reach that mark, after ‘God’s Menu’ and ‘Thunderous’. With the single the group came first twice on television music chart shows, and the song made Time magazine’s list of the best K-pop songs of 2020, the same report said.

That report carried two facts about the record itself: it topped the iTunes Top Albums chart in 23 regions on release, and as of January 2026 it had generated 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, the first of the group’s albums to do so.