SECTOR 17

The record

SECTOR 17 is the repackage of SEVENTEEN’s fourth full-length album Face the Sun, released on 18 July 2022. Four new songs join the earlier nine for thirteen tracks in all, and the title track is ‘_WORLD’.

The album introduction on Bugs explains that a sector, in the album’s sense, is a mountain over 8,000 metres, and that after the sixteen the world has, a seventeenth is ground nobody has found. The same text describes ‘_WORLD’ as a mix of funk and urban R&B, and says the title leaves out the word “new” and puts an underscore in front of it instead, so that anyone can read into it the world they want. The four new songs are the mid-tempo ballad ‘Circles’, the title track, a Korean version of the Japanese single ‘Fallin’ Flower’, and ‘CHEERS’ by the three unit leaders S.Coups, Hoshi and Woozi.

Reviews

IZM’s Jeong Da-yeol reviewed ‘_WORLD’ in September 2022. What he reviewed is the version released with the British singer Anne-Marie on 26 August, after the album. He opened with “they look down, unhurried, on the season that had been so hot”, and wrote that the group who set early summer alight with the fourth album’s title track had climbed higher and were cooling that heat calmly.

On how the song is built he wrote that “the clap that runs through the whole track holds the energy with a funky sense of rhythm, and the quiet, faraway melody brought in from tracks like ‘Home’ folds in the team’s strengths across the board”. The same piece added that “the instruments are kept to a minimum and the singing sits at a relatively low pitch, so it is easy to listen to and easy to sing along with”, and closed: “SEVENTEEN, who chose to build a new height rather than retake the summit — nothing but generosity hangs over this midsummer free hug.”

Among the tracks

The same review singles out the way the title is written. Jeong Da-yeol wrote that “there is a settled kind of care in the title too”, and that “putting an underscore in front of it underlines that it is ready to take any modifier at all”. Of the version with Anne-Marie he wrote: “In a song that thirteen members could fill by themselves in turn, they took out the rap that is one of the group’s own marks and gave the part away, and Anne-Marie answers with a husky tone, forming a balanced harmony a step behind.”

The new song released first was the leaders’ ‘CHEERS’. The album introduction calls it an Asian-trap-styled hip-hop track that celebrates, in plain terms, the growth from their trainee years to where they stand. The opening ‘Circles’ is described there as a mid-tempo ballad about sorrow and pain passing, and about coming back happy.

Numbers

The Hankook Ilbo, citing the Hanteo Chart, reported first-week sales of 1,126,104 copies and called it the first repackage album in K-pop history to sell a million in its first week. By the same report SEVENTEEN had then run seven consecutive million-selling albums from the third full-length album An Ode onwards, and ‘_WORLD’ went to number one on the Melon and Bugs real-time charts immediately after release.

By Billboard’s own chart history the album entered the Billboard 200 dated 6 August 2022 at number four — past the seven Face the Sun had reached two months earlier, and the group’s best on that chart at the time.