KARMA

The record

KARMA is Stray Kids’s fourth full-length album, released on 22 August 2025 with eleven tracks. The title track is ‘Ceremony’. It is the group’s first full-length album in about two years, after ★★★★★ (5-STAR) of June 2023, and the record before it was 合 (HOP), nine months earlier.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record starts from an attempt to work out fate — made, it says, of choices and results tangled together — in the group’s own way. The same text describes ‘Ceremony’ as a song about the moment of finally celebrating oneself after time endured, built on hard trap EDM and a baile funk rhythm, and says the eleven tracks hold different genres and moods while sharing a common attitude and message. The in-house production team 3RACHA worked on every track.

Reviews

Billboard ranked the eleven tracks eleven days after release. The piece, written under the Billboard Korea byline, opens that the album “is, in a word, full of delightful surprises”, and says that while it carries forward the identity of the group’s earlier full-length projects, “KARMA distinguishes itself with a strikingly more cohesive sense of unity, elevating Stray Kids’ artistry to a new level of refinement”. It writes that “while the project spans a wider range of genres than ever before, it still maintains a striking sense of cohesion — thanks largely to the strength of its overarching theme”.

The same title named the record among its best K-pop albums of the year. That entry picked out the title track and ‘CREED’, calling the second a dark track where rock meets hip-hop, and wrote of the album that “with experimental sounds and melodic moments, the album is classic Stray Kids, a blend of intensity and lightness”.

Among the tracks

Of the opener ‘Bleep’ Billboard wrote that it “stands out as the track that feels most quintessentially Stray Kids”, and that “with its powerful boom-bap rhythm, it’s a fitting opener to deliver the album’s central message”. The review called the idea of equating a resolve to ignore outside noise with a literal bleep clever, and wrote that between Changbin’s verse, Seungmin’s and I.N’s vocals and the singing-rap flows of Lee Know and Han, “the track is packed with moments to savor”.

‘0801’ is the song for the fandom STAY. Billboard wrote that it “opens with a heartbeat-like rhythm and warm vocals”, and that it “showcases the voices of all eight members so clearly”. The review noted that where the common formula runs from a Korean verse into an English chorus, here the order is reversed, and called it “a synthwave-pop track that transcends taste”.

Of ‘In My Head’ Billboard wrote that “with lively guitar and drum sounds and an instantly singable chorus, this pop-rock track showcases a fresh musical side of Stray Kids”, and called it “arguably the most delightful surprise on the album”. It described ‘Phoenix’ as an upbeat EDM track written while 3RACHA were immersed in Avicii, and ‘Half Time’ as arriving at the album’s midpoint “with the rallying cry of ‘It’s only the first half’”. Of ‘Mess’ it wrote that it is “an emo hip-hop track where crisp guitar riffs intertwine with heavy beats”, one that “immediately signals HAN’s handiwork”.

Numbers

The Korea Herald reported that the album entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 313,000 equivalent album units in the United States in its first week, making Stray Kids the K-pop act with the most number ones on that chart. By the same report the group became the only act whose first seven albums all reached number one. In the same title’s end-of-year round-up, the album placed second on Billboard’s year-end World Albums chart, behind 合 (HOP) at first.