A

The record

A is the second single in BIGBANG’s MADE series, released on 1 June 2015. It carries ‘뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG)’ and ‘WE LIKE 2 PARTY’, both promoted as title tracks. It is the second of the four monthly releases and follows M by one month.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction said that ‘LOSER’ and ‘BAE BAE’ from M had topped the streaming charts and the music shows through May, and presented A as a record of an entirely different shape. The same text called the video for M a film in a noir register and set up the question of which genre A would answer it with.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the single in ‘1st Listen: late May 2015’, published on 7 June 2015, as four writers’ short notes. Mimyo followed the title track’s shape: “‘뱅뱅뱅’, which runs on explosive energy, comes off its build-up, passes through ‘총 맞은 것처럼’ and drops into empty space.” He wrote that BIGBANG had used that shape before but that the empty space does different work here — “where songs built like this used to leave the space for the performance, this time the space is for the listener’s feeling” — and closed the note: “A ‘tsundere’ dialectic of delicate engineering, tuned by experience and calculation; it is even harder to hold anything against.”

Yoo Je-sang, in the same column, read the single against the group’s older work. “‘뱅뱅뱅’ is exactly the thing the public wants from BIGBANG,” he wrote, adding that the production seemed to have wanted a minimal chorus and to have stopped at a reasonable point. His note ends: “This single, which brings back the mood of the past, could not be more welcome.”

Among the tracks

The writer who spent longest on ‘뱅뱅뱅’ is Lee Gi-seon of IZM, in the outlet’s June 2015 singles column. He pointed at the song’s sense of length, writing that “the beat variation in the chorus and the repetition of the phrase ‘뱅뱅뱅’ give both an odd familiarity and the illusion that the song runs long” — the actual running time, he noted, is under four minutes. On its construction he wrote that it is “a song with more flavour the longer you chew on it: the hidden intentions and devices, the well-judged division of the parts.”

The second song, ‘WE LIKE 2 PARTY’, is the one Mimyo of Idology read as the title track’s pair. He wrote that it takes the tension ‘뱅뱅뱅’ had built and sets it down, naming it in his note as the next track that lets go with the line “I miss you so much I could die.”

Afterwards

D followed a month later and E in August. The eight songs from the four singles were collected on the full-length MADE in December 2016, with three new tracks.