Love&Letter

The record

Love&Letter is the repackage of SEVENTEEN’s first full-length album FIRST ‘LOVE&LETTER’, released on 4 July 2016. It adds five new songs to the original ten for fifteen tracks in all, and the title track is ‘VERY NICE’. It came a little over two months after the album itself.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in ‘1st Listen’, its round-up of new releases from early July 2016, as short pieces by two critics. Doldolmalling wrote of the title track’s staging that “watching it, I felt they were carrying on splendidly the drilled humour that large male groups such as Super Junior have built up”, and added that “at every well-judged turn it is as though a label were attached saying ‘this lyric, this song, this choreography was made by SEVENTEEN, who are in their teens and twenties right now’”.

Haemcha, on what came of the members writing the words, wrote that “in SEVENTEEN’s case the members’ part in the lyrics is one of the positive instances where it helps express the feeling of a song in a way that suits their age”. Of the range of the new songs he wrote: “the care in gathering songs as varied as ‘SIMPLE’, where you can feel the appeal of the vocals, and ‘Space’, where you can feel the appeal of the rappers, is good too.”

IZM’s Hong Eun-sol opened his single review of the title track with two words: “Complicated, and abundant.” He wrote that “to bring all thirteen of them forward the members sing expressively, as though acting”, and that “the sound effects the lyrics call for are varied too. Sweet when pointing at the ‘you’ they like, bright as an explosion for the ‘my’ heart that is pounding. The variations run to the last without letting the strength go.” The same piece added that “it is encouraging that a style particular to SEVENTEEN, rather than an imitation of another group, is gradually taking shape”.

Among the tracks

‘VERY NICE’ is the song The Korea Herald’s Kwon Yae-rim placed second when she ranked SEVENTEEN’s thirty best songs in July 2020, calling it “one of the act’s biggest hits” and “a high energy track that blends multiple musical elements”. Haemcha singled out one line of it — “you seem to be the answer to every question I have” — as the place where the song’s feeling is concentrated, and picked a line from the new song ‘Healing’ for the same reason.

Numbers

weiv listed ‘VERY NICE’ among the tracks its critics chose for 2016 in its year-end round-up. The label ships English titles for the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘아주 NICE’ is VERY NICE, ‘힐링’ is Healing and ‘끝이 안보여’ is Space.