NCT RESONANCE Pt. 2

The record

NCT RESONANCE Pt. 2 is the second half of NCT’s second full-length album, released on 23 November 2020. It adds eight songs to the thirteen of NCT RESONANCE Pt. 1, out six weeks earlier, for 21 tracks in all, and its title track is the newly added ‘90’s Love’.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, gives the eight new songs as ‘90’s Love’, ‘Work It’, ‘Raise The Roof’, ‘My Everything’, ‘단잠 (All About You)’, ‘I.O.U’ and two instrumental pieces. The same text describes the title track as an old-school R&B hip-hop track carried by an upbeat tempo, groove-led drums and a bass line, laying a modern sound over 1990s hip-hop and R&B, and names KENZIE, Adrian McKinnon, Moonshine, Stereotypes, Harvey Mason Jr., Mike Daley, Hitchhiker and minGtion among those who worked on the record.

Reviews

Kim Do-heon of IZM wrote about the title track ‘90’s Love’ on its own in December 2020. “From the new jack swing break to a bass and beat synth that call Cypress Hill to mind,” he wrote, “the era being referenced can be guessed without looking at the title.” He read the party-rap chant that opens the song and the vocoder sample in its back half as retro out in the open, and on the lyric he wrote: “A generation with no experience of it praising the past — ‘the meaning of a time I never saw / walking an orange-lit Apgujeong’ — is unfamiliar, but bold with it.”

The same piece sets out how the song is put together: “The pitching bass loop, the synth bridge that builds tension and then holds a dream-like softness, and the various devices mentioned above are all arranged to flow smoothly into one another.” Kim also wrote that “the overflowing energy and the members’ vocal and rap performances, placed exactly where they belong, move the body first.”

Among the tracks

The title track ‘90’s Love’ is sung by Ten, Winwin, Mark, Jeno, Haechan, Yangyang and Sungchan. By the album introduction its lyric carries the message that everything of value in the past is worth remembering and re-reading into something new.

The introduction describes the other seven new songs in turn. ‘Work It’ is an electronic dance track led by its bass line, synth sound and hook; ‘Raise The Roof’ is a hip-hop track that joins an unusual rhythm to an Eastern-sounding palette, marked by the chant in its chorus. ‘My Everything’ is a ballad sung by Taeil, Xiaojun and Renjun; ‘단잠 (All About You)’ a mid-tempo pop song built on retro and modern bass; ‘I.O.U’ a lo-fi hip-hop track about a confession made on the day of the first snow. Two instrumentals close the record out — ‘Interlude: Present to Future’, which draws the turn from the present to the future, and ‘Outro: Dream Routine’, which carries the group’s intentions for what comes next.

Numbers

This record’s album introduction says the first half passed a million copies within a week of release, and gives its chart placings: number six on the Billboard 200 in the United States, number one on the United World Chart, number two on Japan’s Oricon weekly album chart and number one on its overseas album chart, number one on China’s QQ Music digital album sales chart and number one on the Korean album chart.

Before it

The thirteen songs this album carries again are those of NCT RESONANCE Pt. 1, released on 12 October 2020, and NCT’s first group album is 2018’s NCT 2018 EMPATHY.