맛 (Hot Sauce)

The record

Hot Sauce (Korean title 맛, the word for a taste or a flavour) is NCT DREAM’s first full-length album, released on 10 May 2021 with ten tracks. The title track shares the record’s name. It is the group’s first full-length since the debut single Chewing Gum, and follows the mini album Reload.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as a hip-hop track with Afrobeat in it, and names the contrast between the chanting in the chorus and the minimal, chilled track, along with a signature sound like an incantation, as what marks it. The same text says Yoo Young-jin, KENZIE, DEEZ, Moonshine and minGtion worked on the record, and credits the members Mark, Jeno, Jaemin and Jisung on rap-making.

Reviews

IZM’s Kim Seong-yeop read the album as the point where the group’s second act opens. “If the previous record Reload was a refresh button resetting the world they had built, the first full-length Hot Sauce is the beginning of a second act written by an NCT Dream returned to the starting point,” the review reads, and of the title track: “In that it does not touch any part of their existing style, its presence as the opening song announcing NCT Dream’s new start is distinct.” The same piece saw the b-sides holding on to the older colour, and closed: “Hot Sauce shows, through concept and music alone and without carrying any direct meaning of growth, that a stage of change and maturing is settling into them.”

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record in ‘Monthly’, its column on the albums of May 2021, as two writers’ pieces. Quibi called the group’s strength an unforced naturalness and wrote: “NCT Dream’s first full-length Hot Sauce, which finally arrived after a long way round, is the album in which that naturalness shows most.” Erin, on the same page, wrote that “NCT Dream have reorganised the group’s colour with this full-length album”, and closed: “The album Hot Sauce shows NCT Dream’s own energy at its sharpest while keeping the lyricism and the clarity, and so prepares the group’s second act successfully.”

Rhian Daly of NME, in a review published on 14 May 2021, read the album as a record of how much the group had grown. The album “does boast new levels of maturity and prowess”, the review says, and of the title track: “It’s vibrant and exuberant, but the very SM experimentalism that courses through it elevates it into something more weighty and developed.” The same piece closes: “NCT Dream’s first full-length album is a triumph. It’s confident and cool, and makes infectiously real its creators’ excitement of all being back together again.”

Among the tracks

The title track ‘Hot Sauce’ is on the 25 best K-pop songs of 2021 that Billboard published on 17 December 2021. The entry, signed with the initials J.B. at its end, reads: “With the release of their first full-length album Hot Sauce, NCT Dream truly made its mark on K-pop in 2021 (even hitting the Global 200 chart).” It goes on: “‘Hot Sauce’ represents the best of K-pop when it is ambitious and unafraid to infuse the personalities of its artists straight into the music itself.”

The third track, ‘Dive Into You’, is the one Daly singled out on the record, calling it “the perfect marriage of youth and the band’s increased experience” — it uses the relationship between a whale and the ocean to look at the partnership between two people while its instrumentation keeps things light. IZM’s Kim also named the song, describing its sound as alive as though swimming through a night sea, and grouped it with ‘ANL’ as the tracks that give the record its steadiness.

The closing track ‘Rainbow’ was co-written by the members Mark, Jeno, Jaemin and Jisung. Daly wrote that it carries messages from the members to each other and to their fans, and called it “a fitting way to close their first album”. Quibi quoted the line “we’re always Irreplaceable” from the eighth track, ‘Irreplaceable’, and wrote that hearing it makes you nod along to the group’s unforced performance even now that every member is an adult.

Afterwards

The repackage Hello Future followed seven weeks later, on 28 June 2021, adding three songs to this record’s ten, and the second full-length Glitch Mode came the following March.