NCT

The record

NCT #127 Regulate is NCT 127’s first full-length repackage, released on 23 November 2018 with fourteen tracks. The title track is ‘Simon Says’. It adds three new songs to the eleven of NCT #127 Regular-Irregular, which had arrived six weeks earlier.

SM Entertainment’s album introduction, carried on Bugs, says the album’s name holds “a double meaning: a criticism of a society under control, and the adjustment, by way of recovering the self, that getting free of regulation asks for”. The same text describes the title track as urban hip-hop built on a heavy bass riff and a sharp synth sound, and says the lyrics liken the way a person shapes himself to other people’s expectations and to social convention to a game in which one must do as one is told. The three new songs are ‘Simon Says’, ‘Welcome To My Playground’ and a Korean version of ‘Chain’, the title track of the group’s Japanese debut album.

Reviews

Idology covered the record in ‘1st Listen’ on 28 December 2018, and one writer, Quibbie, wrote the note. He read the title track as carrying out the meaning of the album’s name. He wrote: “if ‘Regular’ compromised the group’s previously ‘irregular’ appeal into something comparatively ‘regular’ out of ambition for North America, ‘Simon Says’ regulates the direction back towards the NCT 127 they were.”

He counted off the parts of the song one by one — “a bass that surges, a laid-back rhythm, a way of singing that turns the voice over by crossing between chest and falsetto or throwing the end of a note away, backing vocals warped with auto-tune, verse transitions that feel like taking a sharp bend” — and added that “the structure of the song itself is not complicated and the chorus melody is simple too, so it prints itself on you much faster”.

Quibbie read the song as fixing the group’s place. He wrote that “it shows the group’s irregular appeal arranged more neatly than ever, even if it is not as obliging as usual, so it seems fair to say that from this song on, NCT 127 have firmly got hold of a sound of their own, distinct from the other groups at SM and from the other units within NCT”.

Among the tracks

Of the title track, Quibbie wrote that it “is so full of subversive sound that fans who liked ‘소방차’ or ‘Cherry Bomb’ will have slapped their knee”. The music video went up on the official channel on 22 November 2018, the day before the release.

‘Welcome To My Playground’ is the song Quibbie read as fit for the concert soon to come. The album introduction describes it as breezy electro-pop made with the producer and singer-songwriter Ra.D, BrotherSu and the lyricist Seo Ji-eum, and says Taeyong and Mark took part in writing the raps, turning the wish to play with the fans on stage into the words.

‘Chain (Korean Ver.)’ is a Korean rerecording of the title track of the group’s Japanese debut album, released in May that year.

Around it

The fourth mini album NCT #127 WE ARE SUPERHUMAN followed six months later.