Kick Back

The record

Kick Back is WayV’s third mini album, released on 10 March 2021 with six tracks. The title track is ‘秘境 (Kick Back)’. It came nine months after the group’s first full-length Awaken The World, and it is their first release under their own name after taking part as one of the teams on NCT RESONANCE Pt. 1.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, describes the title track as a progressive R&B dance track that sets vocals and rap over distinctive synths and a heavy bass line, with a lyric about gathering in a secret place of one’s own and drawing the future together. The same text says the French producer Alawn, who worked on ‘After Midnight’ from the first album, and the lyricist Xiao Han (小寒), who wrote ‘Face to Face (面對面)’ and ‘Dream Launch’, both returned for this record.

Reviews

This record is the first that Idology (아이돌로지) covered on its own pages. Writing in the magazine’s singles column for March 2021, published on 25 April 2021, Kwibi set out why. At the group’s debut the magazine had kept them off its archive list under a policy of excluding Korean acts’ overseas releases and overseas-derived idol groups; once WayV had come through the NCT 2020 releases into the NCT brand proper and promoted in Korea with Korean-language versions, he wrote, that line could no longer be held.

Kwibi placed the group like this: “The ironic position of having set out flying a regional colour and ended up standing on the most transcendent ground of all is, paradoxically, what seems to refine WayV into the cleanest SMP of them all.” He wrote that “the outside-the-human-realm image they have built by repeatedly drawing on space settings and time-leap material is bound up with that, and the dramatic major-key melody they press down on, as on ‘Moonwalk’ and ‘Turn Back Time’, has settled in as the group’s signature for a sense of grandeur.” What has changed on this record, he added, “is a beat that is simpler and clearer and a repeating hook, raising how directly it reads.”

Among the tracks

‘天空海 (Horizon)’ is a unit song sung by Kun, Ten and Xiaojun. The album introduction describes it as a ballad that lays the three members’ harmonies over a lyrical piano and strings, and says its lyric — longing likened to the sky and the sea, and a wait for the day they meet again — carries the group’s feeling towards their fans. The same text notes that this is the second unit song from the three after ‘Face to Face (面對面)’ on Take Over The Moon.

‘Action Figure’ sets drums and a groove-led melody line under a hooking brass sound, and its lyric is told by an action figure who grieves at a reality it cannot move in yet wants to plant hope in others. The trap R&B track ‘梦尽 (All For Love)’, about missing a parted lover, and the hip-hop-beat pop song ‘Good Time’ follow, and the closing track is the Korean version of the title track.

Before it

WayV debuted in January 2019 with the digital release The Vision, followed that year by Take Off and Take Over The Moon, and in November by Love Talk, an English-language single of a song from the latter. The first full-length Awaken The World came in June 2020.