D

The record

D is the third single in BIGBANG’s MADE series, released on 1 July 2015. It carries ‘IF YOU’ and ‘맨정신 (Sober)’, both promoted as title tracks. It sits at the middle of the four monthly releases and follows M and A.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction described D as the record at the exact centre of the MADE series, holding the group’s effort to go past its own limits. The same text said that ‘뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG)’ and ‘WE LIKE 2 PARTY’ from A had filled the month of June, and presented this single as the point at which the series looks back on itself.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the single in ‘1st Listen: late June 2015’, published on 7 July 2015, as three writers’ short notes. Kim Young-dae set the two songs side by side: “‘If You’, which puts nothing but the voices over an acoustic guitar, is the most affecting ballad they have made in some time, and ‘맨정신’ joins a punk mindset to the retro, running rock beat that is current in the American indie rock scene, and joins them handsomely.” Of the group’s method he wrote that “what is interesting about BIGBANG is that they fill the gaps of the (deliberately) loose texture and the strangeness in a song convincingly, by leading with skill and character.”

Kim Yun-ha, in the same column, read the distance between the two songs as the point of the single. “Listening to ‘If you’ and ‘맨정신’, two entirely different songs that seem to have dragged in both extremes of the colours BIGBANG have shown so far, you end up thinking again about the persuasiveness a group has rather than a song,” she wrote, and closed her note: “This is a ‘BIGBANG’ sound so unquestionable that doubting it is boring.”

Among the tracks

‘맨정신’ is the song all three writers picked up. Mimyo of Idology opened his note with “‘맨정신’ is fun” and explained that the song borrows the clichés of what is loosely called EDM while building on rock underneath. On its construction he wrote: “The elements shared by the EDM-styled intro and the rock part of the first verse that follows change places with one another, and the foreign parts inserted along the way land steadily — at the level of method there is a kind of handmade quality that is good to hear.”

Kim Ban-ya of IZM took the song apart in the outlet’s July 2015 singles column. She described the sequence — “G-Dragon and T.O.P trade provocative raps like a couplet; Taeyang, Daesung and Seungri divide up a melody that lands easily on the ear, each in his own style; the song runs hard and then turns the mood over at the peak” — before writing that “the processing is familiar and standardised, but thanks to the lavish care put into the sound the song is wrapped fluently and smoothly.” The same piece describes the series’ release pattern as “a ‘1+1’ in which a crowd-facing song and an experiment come out bound together,” and places this song where it holds up ‘IF YOU’ on the same record.

Afterwards

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