NCT

The record

NCT #127 LIMITLESS is NCT 127’s second mini album, released on 6 January 2017 with six tracks. The title track is ‘無限的我 (무한적아; Limitless)’, which the label prints as ‘Limitless’ outside Korea. It is the first record made as nine: Johnny and Doyoung joined the seven of the debut NCT #127 half a year earlier.

SM Entertainment’s album introduction, carried on Bugs, describes the title track as urban R&B “carrying the meaning of the limitless self”, and says the lyrics take NCT’s own keywords of limitless openness and limitless expansion as the ground for the team’s future and its ambitions. By the same text, Taeyong and Mark took part in writing four of the six songs.

The title track’s music video went up in two editions, a rough version and a performance version.

Reviews

Idology ran the record as four writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’ on 19 January 2017, and Park Hee-ah made it the issue’s ‘Pick!’. She wrote that “‘LIMITLESS’ means the limitless, and the way a Chinese-character expression is mixed into it to make the phrase ‘무한적아’ is an attempt only SM Entertainment could make proudly, on the strength of what it has done before”, and that “they use the expensive sounds one hears in the current music market, and still summon a particular genre that can be called ‘SMP’”.

Oyo read the force of that genre in the title track. He wrote that “the moment you hear the title song ‘無限的我 (무한적아; Limitless)’ you realise again what a fine musical genre SMP was”, and added: “the nerve of settling on ‘무한적아’ — in Chinese characters, no less — as the title of a song by a group that has to become the company’s new engine of growth is remarkable in itself, and between Kenzie’s blunt kick and heavy bassline, which seem to be showing that she is still very much here, the timing with which the harmony is stacked up grandly and the electronic sound that brings it down in an instant, my impression was that SM had staked a great deal on this.”

Yoo Je-sang, in the same issue, pointed to the seam in the song. He wrote that “the title song ‘無限的我 (무한적아;Limitless)’ begins in the future sound that is NCT’s speciality, but by the time it reaches the chorus it ends up showing SM’s own colour”, and that “what is clear is that this is a far more popular result than the songs released under the NCT name so far”.

IZM’s Hong Eun-sol wrote about the title track on its own. He wrote that “the chorus, with harmony stacked thick, is a way of writing very familiar to the generation that grew up with the SMP TVXQ built”, added that “there is also a melody with a clear destination, which makes it familiar”, and noted that it “adds finely chopped hi-hats of the kind trap would use and hip-hop ad-libs faithful to the trends of the 2010s, so it appeals to the listener at the very front of fashion too”.

Among the tracks

‘롤러코스터 (Heartbreaker)’ is the track Oyo named apart from the title track. He called it “the most outstanding example of idol pop borrowing future bass in recent times” and wrote that it “stands out clearly”. The album introduction describes it as EDM pop that reads the rollercoaster of an unrequited love’s changing feelings from a teenager’s point of view.

‘Good Thing’ was heard a month before the release. By the album introduction it was the backing music for ‘Good Thing Dance Performance’, a choreography video made in December 2016 by NCT 127 with the model agency Esteem and W Korea, and Taeyong and Mark took part in writing it. The same text introduces ‘Back 2 U (AM 01:27)’ as a song whose ad-libs in the back half widen its appeal, and ‘Angel’ as a mid-tempo love song Taeyong and Mark helped write.

Numbers

The album introduction for the group’s third mini album, published in June that year, says this record reached “number one on the domestic album charts and on the Billboard World Albums chart, and number one on the overall iTunes album chart in five countries abroad”, and that shipments passed two hundred thousand copies.

Around it

Five months later the third mini album NCT #127 CHERRY BOMB arrived.