NINETEEN

The song

NINETEEN is Natty’s debut single, released on 7 May 2020. It carries the song and its instrumental, and was issued by Swing Entertainment with Stone Music Entertainment. The music video went up on the Stone Music channel the same day.

The album introduction states that this was Natty’s first release, and mentions the 2015 programme SIXTEEN and her 2019 appearance at KCON Thailand. Idology wrote that after meeting the public through television audition programmes and gathering a good deal of expectation, she debuted unusually as a soloist rather than in a group, and put out two singles in that year alone.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) chose Natty for its 2020 rookies of the year. She was the only soloist among the seven acts named, and two critics wrote separate entries on her.

Harusari read this song together with Teddy Bear, which followed that November. Across the two, he wrote, Natty looks less like a storyteller or an actor delivering an invented story than like the real protagonist of it, and the reason he gave was that almost no gap shows between the person and the plan. He wrote that the music and the performance, cut finely to fit the performer, give a sense of alignment that lends real carrying power to what is otherwise a familiar story of a girl chasing a dream, and he named the line she sings — “the dark isn’t dark, because it’s me that shines” — one of the most convincing lyrics of that year. Of the stage he wrote that the ‘NINETEEN’ performance, with its movements stretched out along a rhythmic bass, shows her dancing and her singing at once.

In the same piece, Randy wrote that he could not help admiring how thoroughly Natty takes K-pop in and puts it out again, and pointed to her dancing, to a voice and a rap that carry the nuance of more than one language, and to the way she acts with her face on stage.

Around it

Natty released a second single, Teddy Bear, on 12 November 2020, and debuted again on 5 July 2023 as a member of KISS OF LIFE.