LAST DANCE

The song

‘LAST DANCE’ is one of the two title tracks on MADE, the third full-length album BIGBANG released at midnight on 13 December 2016. Sports Kyunghyang reported that day that this song and ‘FXXK IT’ were the album’s two title tracks. G-Dragon wrote the music with Seo Won-jin and Jeon Yong-jun, and the lyrics with T.O.P and Taeyang; the track runs four minutes and 39 seconds, and the music video went up on the group’s official channel the day before release, on 12 December.

G-Dragon told Sports Kyunghyang that the song was the group’s own story, what was on their minds, and their most sincere song. The same report says its lyrics were widely talked about in the days after release.

MADE was the group’s first full-length album in eight years, after Remember in 2008. Eight of its 11 tracks had already appeared on the four ‘MADE SERIES’ singles released over four months in 2015, and three were new: this song, ‘FXXK IT’ and ‘GIRLFRIEND’. YG Entertainment’s album introduction describes the record as the full stop of the ‘MADE SERIES’ and the close of the group’s tenth-anniversary project. In an interview published on release day, The Korea Times reported that the three new songs took the top of eight Korean streaming charts.

Reviews

No review of this song on its own exists; what the critics wrote about it sits inside their reviews of MADE.

IZM ran Hyun Min-hyung’s review of the record in its December 2016 issue. Writing about the feeling the album works in, he named this song first: “On this record too, through songs like ‘LAST DANCE’, ‘LOSER’ and ‘IF YOU’, they paint the sadness and loneliness native to being human in fine detail, in five different shades of colour.” In the track listing at the foot of the same review, IZM marked this song as one of its picks.

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the record on 31 December 2016 in ‘1st Listen’, the column it gives to the releases of the middle of each month. Jo Seong-min placed this song as one that carries on the mood running from ‘Monster’ through ‘BLUE’, and wrote that the three new songs close the album out with a work that makes the group’s own place firm. Of the record as a whole he wrote that it “is the album where BIGBANG’s strengths as an idol group and their standing as artists are most evenly balanced”.

In the same column Hamchwa wrote about the four singles and three new songs gathered into one record: “An album this full may well be hard to come by again.”

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number two on its Digital Chart for week 51 of 2016 (11 to 17 December), the week of release. All 11 songs from MADE were on that week’s chart, with ‘FXXK IT’ at number one. This song was at number five the following week, week 52 (18 to 24 December), and at number 18 in week one of 2017 (1 to 7 January).

Billboard entered MADE at number one on its World Albums chart dated 31 December 2016.

The song returned to the chart five years later. In week 16 of 2022 (10 to 16 April), the week after the group released ‘Still Life’ on 5 April, it was back on Circle Chart’s Digital Chart at number 132.