Phantom

The record

Phantom is WayV’s fourth mini album, released on 28 December 2022 with eight tracks. The title track carries the album’s name. The last two tracks are bonus tracks: the unit songs ‘这时烟火 (Back To You)’ and ‘Low Low’.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, describes ‘Phantom’ as a trap-hip-hop-based dance pop song built on avant-garde elements, flowing vocal harmony and a large string sound, and says the lyric likens hardship and adversity to a phantom, refusing to be controlled by it. The same text says the group worked again with Pan Yan-ting, who wrote the words for ‘秘境 (Kick Back)’, the title track of the third mini album Kick Back, and names Mike Daley, DEEZ, LDN Noise, JINBYJIN, Connor McDonough and David Simon among the writers.

Reviews

Idology carried the record in the album half of its Monthly column covering releases from November and December 2022. In that issue, published on 7 February 2023, the record was written up by Erin.

Erin opened the notes by writing that “‘Phantom’ strains out the unfamiliar, aggressive and affectedly wicked parts of SMP as though lifting them off with a net, and leaves only a classical refinement”. Erin wrote that strings and a beat like a struck drum build a large sense of space, and read the lyric — truth seen through from behind a mask in the dark — as recalling The Phantom of the Opera, the gaze of the masked figure adding a tension there is no escaping. The last line of the notes reads: “The group came back after a break of more than a year, which is not short for an idol group, but the completeness of ‘Phantom’ confirms the cohesion WayV has as a team.”

Among the tracks

Erin named three songs. Of ‘Diamonds Only’ Erin wrote that “the vast sense of space in ‘Phantom’ takes shape as a sacred temple when it reaches ‘Diamonds Only’”, and that “the lyric of ‘Diamonds Only’, which says that dreams and love will spread unchanged, like the hard property of a diamond that endures beyond time, draws out a sanctity wrapped in an irresistible weight, through the heaviness of a thickly textured bass and the smoothness of the vocals”. The album introduction calls the song a progressive R&B hip-hop track pointed by an aggressive, thick bassline, carrying the message that a dream and a love long held are as bright and precious as a diamond.

‘Good Life’ and ‘Bounce Back’ Erin took in one sentence: “The clear synthesiser sound of ‘Good Life’, which seems to come from a plucked instrument, carries the album’s classical beauty onward, and ‘Bounce Back’, marked by the members’ sleek vocals and harmonies over a minimal beat, keeps the sanctity of a presence that seems to stand outside time and space, so that the album as a whole is complete.” The album introduction describes ‘Good Life’ as a medium-tempo R&B song combining light rapping and singing, and ‘Bounce Back’ as a dance pop song continuing the story of the earlier ‘真实谎言 (Say It)’, ‘噩梦 (Come Back)’ and ‘执迷 (Unbreakable)’.

Around it

The album introduction says the two bonus tracks are unit songs released earlier: ‘这时烟火 (Back To You)’, a ballad by Kun and Xiaojun, and ‘Low Low’, a hip-hop track by Ten and YangYang. The next record came ten months later — the second full-length album On My Youth, released on 1 November 2023.