樂-STAR (ROCK-STAR)

The record

樂-STAR (ROCK-STAR) is the mini album Stray Kids released on 10 November 2023, with eight tracks. The title track is ‘LALALALA’. It follows the third full-length album ★★★★★ (5-STAR) by five months.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record is of a piece with the album before it, and that it carries both the sense of people who know how to enjoy themselves and the ambition to become rock stars of an era. The same text gives the record’s message as a line saying that whatever the situation, their 락 (rak) goes on — one syllable that is at once the Korean spelling of rock and the reading of 樂, the character for enjoyment, which is the pun the album’s title turns on. It describes the title track as built on wordplay around that syllable, with rock elements in the repeated sound of the chorus. The in-house production team 3RACHA made the title track, working with the German producer duo Cubeatz, VERSACHOI, Millionboy and Jun2.

Reviews

Billboard named the title track among its best K-pop songs of 2023. Jeff Benjamin wrote that “with the phonk-y Bang Chan production buzzing with the excitement of the final level of a video game, ‘LALALALA’ opens with a ferocity that never lets up throughout its three minutes”. He wrote that the group speak “to pushing through all kinds of pain to find joy and release as they do through music”, and that “the universal message, coupled with both an original and rock version, propelled it to become SKZ’s first Billboard Hot 100 entry this year”.

IZM’s Jang Jun-hwan reviewed the title track on its own. He wrote that the group had gone past putting kitsch wordplay and unusual subjects forward every time, and had “reached a level of handling that strategy skilfully enough to be called masters of it”. Of the song he wrote that “as befits a track carrying the two-part star story, it shows its confidence everywhere”.

Among the tracks

Of the title track Jang wrote that it brings in drift phonk, marked by an eerie cowbell sound, and that wordplay flies through it without a pause. He added that “in exchange, conscious of the total quantity of sharp ingredients, they turned down the overall intensity of the flavour”, and that set against the previous promoted song ‘S-Class’, or even against the album’s own opener ‘Megaverse’, “a relatively consistent sense of speed and a formal construction come to the fore”. The album introduction on Bugs points at the same place, giving the song’s main themes as a phonk sound, an afrobeats-based rhythm and a distortion bass.

The opening track is ‘Megaverse’. The group’s own comment on the Bugs page describes it as a song whose restrained but concentrated energy rests on a spare rhythm and a strong bass sound, and says its name holds two meanings at once, a mega-sized verse and a world of its own. The last two tracks are the Korean version of the title song from the group’s first Japanese mini album and a rock version of the title track — and that rock version is one of the reasons Billboard gave for the song’s chart entry.

Numbers

The Korea Herald reported that the album entered the Billboard 200 at number one, the group’s fourth consecutive chart-topper. By the same report it sold more than two million copies in two days and, in its release week, topped the iTunes albums chart in 32 regions and the songs chart in 37. The same title later reported that the title track reached number 90 on the Billboard Hot 100.