Russian Roulette

The record

Russian Roulette is Red Velvet’s third mini album, released on 7 September 2016 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘러시안 룰렛 (Russian Roulette)’. It turns back to the red side after The Velvet six months earlier.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as synth-pop marked by a retro eight-bit sound line recalling an arcade machine, with a lyric that likens winning someone over to a game of Russian roulette and a hook built on “Heart B-B-Beat”. By the same text the record moves between pop dance, new jack swing, acoustic pop and tropical house.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as four writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of early September 2016. Kim Young-dae closed his note by calling it “an excellent pop album in which it is hard to find a musical fault”, and wrote that ‘Lucky Girl’ and ‘Bad Dracula’ “put the group’s signature sound on full display, joining kitsch to soulful singing as the earlier records did”. Kim Yun-ha called the title track “a very fine pop number”, writing that “the meeting of a crisp melody and playful chiptune sounds, a rhythm part that keeps a certain weight without losing pace, and a chorus that pushes and pulls like a spirit — you could call it the textbook of well-made girl pop and not be wrong”. Yu Je-sang chose the mini album as the column’s ‘Pick!’.

Lee Gi-seon of IZM wrote of the title track that “it is put together out of things used somewhere before, a borrowed retro synth sound and a chorus bent with a touch of trot, and it is still remarkably catchy”, and called it “a clever track that knows where this group’s strength is and goes straight at it”. He also pointed to how the seven songs are used: “It solves the problem through pacing — the drive wound up in ‘Bad dracula’ is let out cleanly in ‘Sunny afternoon’.”

Among the tracks

The writer who took the title track apart at greatest length is weiv’s Kim Se-cheol, in a piece published on 6 October 2016. Following the structure in order, he wrote that “the song cuts vocal samples short from the very start and pours them out breathlessly, laying a glittering chiptune sound on top”, and that after the verse catches its breath the chorus brings the freshness the rhythm makes. Of the ending he wrote: “The last 30 seconds are where it shines. The close, laying a lead synth over the delayed synth that had been under the chorus, reaches a climax without damaging the sweetness.” He called it “a solid song, packed with things to like”.

Tássia Assis of NME placed the same song eighth in the 127-song retrospective the outlet published on 1 August 2024 for the group’s tenth anniversary. She wrote that rather than going all the way like the group’s more upbeat tracks it “lounges comfortably in an addictive, staccato midtempo”, and that the repetition of syllables and the synth blips make it hypnotic yet never tiring.

The closing track ‘My Dear’ is the song IZM and Idology picked out together. Lee Gi-seon wrote that “‘My dear’, with its striking interlude pointed by a muted trumpet, holds its tempo calmly through many modulations and does its work as a perfect close to the album”, and Yu Je-sang found in it “the air of the nineties musicians led by Yoon Sang, which could not be better”. Assis placed the track 101st and wrote that the lines sprinkled between give it a texture of its own.

Assis covered four more songs from the record. She called ‘Lucky Girl’ a doo-wop-inflected retro track that lives up to the concept and adds its own flavour with playful vocal flexes, and wrote that ‘Bad Dracula’, whose vampire has no intention of frightening anyone and only wants to dance the night away, shows how the group take their own spin on any theme. ‘Sunny Afternoon’ she described as a song named exactly after how it feels, and ‘Fool’, with its wobbly guitar, as “just a little silly, just a little clumsy, but thoroughly adorable”.

Afterwards

Rookie followed five months later, and the summer mini album The Red Summer came that July.