NCT

The record

NCT #127 Neo Zone is NCT 127’s second full-length album, released on 6 March 2020 with thirteen tracks. The title track is ‘영웅 (英雄; Kick It)’, which the label prints as ‘Kick It’ outside Korea. It came a year and five months after the first full-length, NCT #127 Regular-Irregular.

SM Entertainment’s album introduction, carried on Bugs, describes the title track as “hip-hop dance with a strong tempo, bringing together an addictive signature vocoder sound, a dynamic bass-gliding source and NCT 127’s energetic vocals”, and says the lyrics carry a message about getting past one’s trauma. The same text names Dem Jointz, The Underdogs, The Stereotypes, LDN Noise, Yoo Young-jin, Kenzie, Hitchhiker and DEEZ among those who worked on it, and says the members Taeyong, Mark and Johnny took part in writing.

Reviews

IZM’s Lim Sun-hee read the album as closing the distance between the group and a wide audience. She wrote that “the title song ‘영웅 (英雄 : Kick It)’ turns that trauma over”, and that “it takes the steady choice of following the old pattern of SMP while narrowing the distance from the public, and the saturation of the team’s colour has gone up instead”. With this record, she wrote, “the album title ‘Neo Zone’ has been built to some degree”.

Debbie Aderinkomi of Clash read the album across the width of its thirteen songs in a review of 6 March 2020, and Clash printed a score of eight out of ten. She wrote: “Overall, ‘NCT #127 Neo Zone’ is sure to please NCTzens and new fans alike.”

Idology put the record in ‘Twenty albums of the year’ in its 2020 year-end series, published on 8 January 2021. Squib wrote that “to speak of the state, or the height, that SMP reached in 2020, this album has to be taken in”, noted that its twelve songs broadcast one distinct zone after another in keeping with the ‘Channel NCT’ concept, and closed: “it would not be an overstatement to say that SM’s ‘neo culture technology’ is being built through NCT’s music rather than through its system.”

Billboard placed the album fifth in its ten best K-pop albums of 2020, published on 23 December 2020. The entry opens with “one of the best things about NCT 127 is that their music is as expansive as they are”, and adds that “Neo Zone is a testament to this, as its 13 tracks find the group moving from classic R&B influences to ’90s synths to even incorporating metal”.

Among the tracks

The title track is the one four pieces put forward together. IZM’s Hwang Sun-eop, writing about it on its own, called it “a song with a definite character” and wrote that “even though the construction hands the baton back and forth between rap parts and vocal parts that are quite unlike each other, it carries on smoothly on the ground of the same beat loop, which is interesting in itself”; he added that “the singing asserts itself more plainly than ever, so that even setting the performance aside there is enough pleasure in listening, and I want to give it credit for that”. Lim Sun-hee wrote that “the emphasis of ‘영웅 (英雄 : Kick It)’ is in its control of loud and soft”.

Idology also put the song in ‘Twenty songs of the year’ for 2020, published on 30 December 2020. Third wrote that “as always, it throws the listener off with a development that is hard to predict”, and that “it is a song that seems simply to run, but taken apart, a delicate construction stands out”. He added that “Mark and Taeyong’s raps still work as the key point and yet are distributed as though marking emphases in exactly the right places, and the use of the vocals in between is pushed as far as it will go to keep the balance”, and that “the moment in the back half where Taeil’s high ad-lib overlaps with the dance break is thrilling enough to call the highlight”. Clash noted that the song “appropriately references Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, Hero and Kill Bill, filled with martial arts-charged lyrics and imagery”, and Billboard wrote that “the anthemic ‘Kick It’ is full of the trademark NCT127 swagger, luring us in with a mechanical whirring, immediately launching us into a versatile soundscape dotted with rap, R&B, and electronica”.

‘Day Dream (白日夢)’ and two songs from the back half are the ones Lim Sun-hee put forward. She wrote that “on the mid-tempo ‘Day dream’ a falsetto raises a dreamlike atmosphere under a delicate melody, and the team’s own clear choral singing is satisfying”, that “‘메아리’, with its cool synthesiser, and ‘우산’, which draws a picture out of Seo Ji-eum’s words, both lift the mood freshly”, and that “even without a killing point the melody stays distinct, and the members’ timbres ride it and flow on smoothly”.

Squib counted the album’s width by naming its songs — “from ‘영웅’, the essence of SMP, to ‘뿔’, which shows off the ‘neo’ quality NCT has claimed, to ‘Sit Down!’, which whets an old-fashioned sense to a sharp edge, to ‘백야’, a solid R&B that makes you wonder whether Harvey Mason Jr. is reproducing the Dreamgirls soundtrack inside K-pop, to ‘Dreams Come True’, which seems to pay homage to S.E.S. in the 1990s”. Billboard wrote of the opening track that “‘Elevator,’ which kicks off the album by harking back to the feel-good flavor of 90’s dance-pop, is delightfully light”, and of ‘뿔 (MAD DOG)’ and ‘Sit Down!’ that they are “packed with addictive earworm hooks, enough to go back for a second or third listen”. Clash noted that the music video for ‘Dreams Come True’ had gone up months before the album, and that the song and video “paid homage to ’90s R&B, featuring intense softbox lighting, all black get-ups and VHS video vibes”.

Numbers

Billboard placed the album fifth among its ten K-pop albums of 2020. IZM’s Lim Sun-hee wrote in the same review that the record reached number five on the Billboard album chart.

Around it

Two months later, on 19 May, the repackage NCT #127 Neo Zone: The Final Round added four new songs to these thirteen.