My Little Society

The record

My Little Society is the third mini album by fromis_9, released on 16 September 2020. It carries five tracks, and the title track is ‘Feel Good (SECRET CODE)’. The album introduction dates it a year and three months after ‘FUN!’, the title track of their first single album.

The same page says the record takes as its subject a free space where any version of yourself is fine. It describes the title track as a bright song built on a 1980s funk guitar riff and its chorus, composed by Lee Woo-min, Justin Reinstein and JJean, with lyrics by Seo Ji-eum and Chosim.

Reviews

IZM’s Hwang Seon-eop reviewed the title track in the outlet’s September 2020 issue. “The heart of this song is the groove that the funky guitar riff makes,” he wrote, and he found the idea behind it interesting: rather than reaching for something polished, the song draws on a proven inheritance from the past and turns it into something of the group’s own.

Reading it beside the earlier ‘FUN!’, the same piece said the song is “shaped once again around melody, and rests on a common appeal that can reach a wider audience.” On the melodic side he credited the composer Lee Woo-min.

Among the tracks

Of the title track, IZM wrote that “the melodious chorus and the ‘Nanana’ passage that follows it carry a popular appeal that wraps itself around the listener.” The album introduction gives the song’s message as the pleasure of being in a space of one’s own.

The third track is ‘별의 밤’ (Byeorui Bam), which reads as a night of stars, and Lee Seo-yeon wrote it herself. The album introduction describes a song that opens on quiet piano and builds as instruments join, its lyric turning an empty room into a black night sky and the person on the writer’s mind into a star. The second track, ‘Weather’, is described as a kitsch intro over minimal funk, comparing a self that changes hour by hour to the weather.

Members wrote lyrics on the other two songs. Lee Sae-rom wrote for ‘Somebody to love’, a mid-tempo pop song with a jazzy piano line. Lee Sae-rom and Park Ji-won wrote together for ‘물고기’ (Mulgogi), the Korean word for a fish, which the same page describes as a new-disco track told from inside a small tank, through the fish’s own eyes.

Promotion

BizEnter reported that the title track was performed for the first time on Mnet’s M Countdown on 17 September, the day after release.