NCT

The record

NCT #127 Regular-Irregular is NCT 127’s first full-length album, released on 12 October 2018 with eleven tracks. The title track is ‘Regular’. It came two years and three months after the debut.

SM Entertainment’s album introduction, carried on Bugs, says the record is built so that the sixth track, ‘Interlude: Regular to Irregular’, divides it — “the first half expressing the real world, the second half the world of dreams” — and describes the title track as latin trap. The same text notes that the title track appears in a Korean and an English version, and that The Stereotypes, LDN Noise, Hitchhiker and DEEZ, among other musicians from Korea and abroad, worked on the album alongside the members Taeyong and Mark.

Reviews

Idology ran the record as three writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’ on 8 November 2018, and both Mimyo and Quibbie made it a ‘Pick!’. Mimyo called it “an album that sounds like an answer to the complaint that NCT is too difficult”, and wrote that “in fact the songs move with wide swings and many bends, like a musical, and have plenty that is new, and yet the melodies are sweet and the breathing of the stimulus is so deft that it holds an extraordinary concentration”. He read its shape as “showing its friendliness in a first half you can hear cheerfully and in good spirits, and then moving on to the advanced course”.

Quibbie called it “an album that ties decent songs together organically, as the album introduction claims for it”, and found the way it put locality forward interesting. He wrote that “laying the horizontal axis of the spatial ‘city’ across the vertical axis of the temporal ‘neo’ makes the group’s footing feel firmer”.

Simdyang called it “NCT 127’s first full-length, the one that gathers the NCT system together”, and wrote that “in keeping with a world built around dreams, the track list flows as smoothly as falling from waking into sleep”.

IZM’s Jung Min-jae wrote about the title track on its own: “the song is well made. The trap beat with latin elements, the solid rap performance and a chorus thrown out in a single voice are attractive. It even picks up the fun of listening for rhyme, with ‘zone’, ‘gold’ and ‘공(0)’.”

Billboard placed the album 15th in its 20 best K-pop albums of 2018, published on 17 December 2018. The entry says that “every good K-pop album has a strong concept, and with Regular-Irregular, NCT 127 delivered a high-brow vision for their debut full-length that arguably exemplifies Korea’s pop-music scene”, and that the combination of the two halves made “one of K-pop’s most ambitious projects of 2018”.

Among the tracks

‘내 Van (My Van)’ is the song three writers put forward together. Mimyo picked it as the track “that lets you hear a ‘dope’ you would never have expected from SM”, and Quibbie wrote: “do please listen to ‘내 Van’, which leaves a sharp aftertaste.” Simdyang wrote that “‘My Van’ is startling too — the journey from waking into dreams can also be heard as the process of an idol who had been singing in the glitter coming down off the stage and loading a tired body into the van”.

Of ‘Interlude: Regular to Irregular’, Simdyang wrote that “the ‘Interlude’ that loosens the border of the moment one crosses from waking into a dream — between the conscious and the unconscious — is the most striking, and it will be because of the narration, like NCT’s own diary, met in that precarious space joining the real and the dreamt”.

Mimyo picked out ‘Replay (PM 01:27)’ as the song “that holds the chill of future house as sweetness”, and ‘나의 모든 순간 (No Longer)’ as the one whose “fine, lovely melody rings out quietly”; Quibbie recommended “‘Knock On’, which sinks softly”. Billboard pointed to the statement-making single ‘Regular’ and to dips from EDM-pop to ’90s R&B on the first half, and to hard hip-hop, electro-funk and an English-language track on the second.

Numbers

Idology put two of the album’s videos in ‘Music videos of the year’ in its 2018 year-end series, published on 31 March 2019. Third wrote of the ‘Regular’ video that “you get to see a Seoul so unfamiliar it looks like the first one in the world”, and Squib wrote of the office-themed ‘Irregular Office’ video that “the office concept, which fits the members and the team and the title song exactly, is the best thing in it”.

The album introduction for the repackage a month later says this first full-length “reached number 86 on Billboard 200, the main album chart in the United States, as well as number one on the overall iTunes album chart in 22 territories worldwide, number one on Xiami Music’s Korean music chart in China, number one on the Gaon monthly overall album chart for October, and four wins on the music shows”.

Around it

On 23 November the same year the repackage NCT #127 Regulate added three new songs to these eleven.