ORANGE BLOODENHYPEN's fifth mini album, released on 17 November 2023 with seven tracks led by 'Sweet Venom'. It is the second record in the BLOOD series.
ORANGE BLOOD is ENHYPEN’s fifth mini album, released on 17 November 2023 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘Sweet Venom’. It is the second record in the BLOOD series, six months after DARK BLOOD.
BELIFT LAB’s album introduction on Bugs calls it the sequel to DARK BLOOD. The boy who had been punished with forgetting meets the other person again, loses the power that had seemed endless and learns that nothing is without limit — and then decides to stake everything on this moment so that he will not regret it. The same text says the resolve is shown in orange, the warmest colour, and splits the concept photographs into two versions named for Sanskrit words: ‘KSANA’, an instant, and ‘KALPA’, a span of time too long to count. The concept trailer was shot entirely on Jeju and was directed again by Yoo Kwang-goeng, who made the trailer for DARK BLOOD.
Billboard included the record in ‘The 25 Best K-Pop Albums of 2023’, published on 29 December 2023. Jeff Benjamin, who signs the entry ‘J.B.’, wrote that the group had spent the autumn of 2023 on the Fate World Tour hyping November’s album as “the comeback of the year” and that “their excitement was well warranted”. The title track ‘Sweet Venom’, the entry says, was “one of 2023’s smoothest funk-pop offerings to date”.
The title track is the track Benjamin reached for first. BELIFT LAB’s album introduction says it sings of a sweet poison that makes the singer feel alive, and the record carries an English version of it as well as a digital-only version with Bella Poarch.
Benjamin named two B-sides. He wrote that ‘Blind’ is among “some of ENHYPEN’s best vocal performances”, and read ‘Orange Flower (You Complete Me)’ as a song that “sounds prime for a viral crossover like the guys’ TikTok hits ‘Polaroid Love’ and ‘TFW (That Feeling When)’”.
In the same entry Benjamin wrote that the mini album entered the Billboard 200 at number four in the month of its release, with 90,000 equivalent album units, which was a new best sales week for the group.
The second album ROMANCE : UNTOLD followed in July the next year and opened the next series.
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ENHYPEN's eighth mini album THE SIN : BLISS sold 2,099,048 copies in its first week on sale, from 21 to 27 August. The count is Hanteo Chart's, released on 28 August. It is the group's fifth double-million seller, and all five domestic albums it has released in three years have passed two million.
