MADE

The record

MADE is BIGBANG’s third full-length album, released on 13 December 2016 with 11 tracks. The title tracks are ‘에라 모르겠다 (Fxxk It)’ and ‘LAST DANCE’. It gathers the eight songs from the four monthly MADE singles of 2015 — M, A, D and E — and adds three new ones.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction called it the group’s first full-length in eight years and the close of both the MADE series and the tenth-anniversary project. The same text names Teddy, Choice37, Jeon Yong-jun and 24 alongside the members on the three new songs, and says the album was made as six canvas editions whose artwork stands for the individual members and for the fans.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the album in ‘1st Listen: mid-December 2016’, published on 31 December 2016, as two writers’ short notes. Jo Seong-min wrote of the new songs that “rather than meeting the long absence ahead in a hurry, they show the ease of a top-class act in the K-pop scene,” and said that, contrary to the worry raised while the four singles were coming out one at a time, “listening to the full album, it was surprising to find that it makes a steady flow, as though it had been planned as an album from the start.” He closed his note: “This is the album on which BIGBANG’s strengths as idols and their standing as artists are most evenly balanced.”

Jeff Benjamin of Billboard placed the album sixth in the outlet’s 10 best K-pop albums of 2016, published on 23 December 2016. “It’s an album a year-in-a-half overdue, but its value as a standalone piece of work is undeniable,” he wrote, describing the result as “career-exemplifying tracks that bring playful electronic hip-hop (see ‘Fxxk It’ or ‘Bae Bae’) along with heartrending emotional jams (‘Let’s Not Fall in Love’ like 2015’s K-Pop Song of the Year ‘Loser’)”. The entry ends: “Altogether, it’s a testament to the versatility K-pop acts can show in the music and just how truly hard it is to call K-pop a ‘genre.’”

Hyun Min-hyung of IZM, in the outlet’s December 2016 album column, picked out the places where the record turns to Korean material. “Reaching back into our own particular character deserves praise,” he wrote — “‘에라 모르겠다’, which grafts a 1980s retro style onto the video and mixes interjections into the chorus; ‘IF YOU’, whose striking acoustic guitar figure recalls a standard pop ballad; ‘BAE BAE’, which borrows the call of a rice-cake seller.” He added that “ten years brought them assurance, and it comes out as wit in the songs.”

Among the tracks

The three new songs are ‘에라 모르겠다’, ‘LAST DANCE’ and ‘GIRLFRIEND’. Jo Seong-min put all three in one sentence: “From ‘에라 모르겠다’, full of the ‘Korean’ props that have been GD’s steady interest and theme, to ‘LAST DANCE’, which carries straight on with the mood of the ‘BIGBANG blues’ of ‘Monster’ and ‘BLUE’, to ‘GIRLFRIEND’, which sounds more plaintive than ever — it finishes as a work that firmly settles BIGBANG’s singular position and presence.” Hamchwa, in the same column, set the three against the earlier eight: “If the songs released before were each an extreme of the musical territory possible for BIGBANG, then sorting the new ones as BIGBANG music inside a familiar safe range makes each song’s character show more clearly, and with these filled in it also looks like a pentagon graph finally completed.” He added: “An album this full may be hard to come by again.”

Hyun Min-hyung followed the record’s lyrical axis separately. “Here too, through songs like ‘LAST DANCE’, ‘LOSER’ and ‘IF YOU’, they paint the sad and lonely feeling native to people in five kinds of shading,” he wrote, and on the arrangements: “‘에라 모르겠다’, which brings in the fashionable future synth; ‘GIRLFRIEND’ and ‘우리 사랑하지 말아요’, which are band-based and lean on strings.” Two of the new songs have pages of their own on this site: ‘에라 모르겠다’ and ‘LAST DANCE’.

Numbers

The album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 172. Writing on 20 December 2016, Jeff Benjamin of Billboard cited Nielsen Music for 6,000 equivalent album units in the United States in the week ending 15 December, a little more than 4,000 of them in traditional album sales. That was the group’s largest sales week for an album in the United States, the same story said, beating the 4,000 logged by ALIVE in its first week in 2012.