Midnight Guest

The record

Midnight Guest is the fourth mini album by fromis_9, released on 17 January 2022. It carries five tracks, and the title track is the second of them, ‘DM’. It is a record of the nine-member line-up, and from our Memento Box followed five months later.

The album introduction on Bugs says the five tracks are held together by one premise: the members slip out at dawn and call on people who are up through the night. The title track, the same text says, is a pop song built on a funky bassline. The third track, ‘Love is Around’, and the fourth, ‘Hush Hush’, are unit songs, and Park Ji-won and Lee Seo-yeon share the writing and composing credits on ‘Hush Hush’.

Reviews

Idology’s Binunmul took up the title track in the webzine’s round-up of January 2022 singles. He wrote that “the strength of ‘DM’ is, with nothing to argue about and as plainly as can be, the moment the first chorus arrives”, and described that stretch this way: “It opens on hazy synths and a springy bass that call up city pop, runs to the pre-chorus with no great rise or fall, stops dead, and then Park Ji-won’s clear vocal cuts in — a passage that hands you, all at once and far ahead of time, the unmatched release you would expect at the climax of some vast story.” The same piece read the song as carrying forward the combination the group has built since its debut.

IZM made the record its Monthly Pick for January 2022. Son Ki-ho’s single sentence for it reads: “Riding a melody polished with care, their growth too will soon be a smooth upward curve.” In the same outlet’s Editors’ Choice for that year, Kim Seong-uk put ‘DM’ on his own list and called it “a jewel shining clear among head-aching concepts”.

Billboard placed ‘DM’ among its 25 best K-pop songs of 2022. The entry, signed J.B., opens: “Another year passes in the K-pop scene and fromis_9 proves they cannot, and will not, make a bad pop song.” It calls the song “another gem in their discography”.

Among the tracks

The title track ‘DM’ is the song all three outlets singled out. Idology wrote that the chorus’s top line “works with vocals that hit their high notes lightly, and takes your heart away so sweetly that one listen leaves no way out”, and Billboard wrote that the members step up their vocal game throughout that chorus.

Idology returned to two of this record’s tracks half a year later, reviewing the next one. The same writer wrote that “the alluring concept of ‘Escape Room’ carries over into ‘Rewind’, and the particular brightness and range of colour (‘Hush Hush’) into ‘Cheese’ and ‘Up And’” on from our Memento Box.

Numbers

Billboard put ‘DM’ on its list of the year’s 25 best K-pop songs on 6 December 2022. Idology placed the song among its own 20 songs of the year later that month, reprinting the sentences from its January round-up in that entry. IZM’s Monthly Pick for January 2022 is this record.