We Go Up

The record

We Go Up is NCT DREAM’s second mini album, released on 3 September 2018 with six tracks. The title track shares the record’s name, and the last track is its Chinese version.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as an urban hip-hop track in which old-school rapping meets a vocal hook that turns against it, over groovy bells, a bubbly bass and popcorn synths. The same text names The Stereotypes, August Rigo, Bazzi, Rice n’ Peas, Cazzi Opeia, Moonshine, Kenzie and Seo Ji-eum among those who worked on it, and credits the members Mark, Jeno, Jaemin and Jisung on lyrics. Of ‘Dear DREAM’, it says the song was written for Mark, the first member to graduate from the unit at the end of that year’s activity.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as Simdyang’s note in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of early September 2018. The writer opened by reading the group’s discography as a list of firsts, and said the ‘Dear Dream’ teaser released before the album “carried too much to be passed over as a concept teaser”.

The same writer saw the title track sitting close to that teaser. “The colourful beat and their high-spirited movement were fresh, but the lyric floating over the song read like a letter,” the note reads, and the writer read that letter as a resolve: “this is not the end but the time of moving on toward the next stage, and we have an endless next.”

Among the tracks

Simdyang wrote that the b-sides run on the same theme of memory and farewell. “‘1, 2, 3’, marked by a unison of soft texture, keeps a beautiful other in a photograph so it can be looked at longer, and ‘Beautiful Time’, drawn with an affectionate guitar sound and a blinking synth, walks a darkening street looking back,” the note reads.

Of ‘Dear DREAM’, which members co-wrote, the same writer said it “draws the shape of parting in the clearest form there is”, showing the time that has slipped past, the moments worth keeping and the embrace passed between them. Of the fourth track the same note says: “I expected ‘Drippin’’ to stick out on the tracklist because of the trap genre, but it makes an unexpectedly cute impression, and it is probably a hint about NCT Dream’s next step.”

Afterwards

Mark graduated at the end of that year’s activity, as the Bugs introduction had said he would, and the third mini album We Boom followed on 26 July 2019. Reviewing the first full-length Hot Sauce in 2021, Idology’s Erin wrote that Mark’s return to the line-up had been settled in the meantime.