Songbird

The record

Songbird is NCT WISH’s second single, released on 1 July 2024. It carries the Korean versions of two songs, the title track ‘Songbird’ and ‘Tears Are Falling’.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, notes that the single came about four months after the group’s Korean debut single WISH, which had gone out in March.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) named the group in ‘Rookies of the Year 2024’, published on 26 February 2025, and its selection note was written across this single, WISH and Steady. Seukwip started from the word in the group’s name — “where NCT DREAM spoke of hope, NCT WISH sings of a wish” — and wrote that “a daydream of sweet days in fact rests on a bitter reality”. He read the lyrics of the three records as resting on a belief in being together, giving ’Songbird’s line “together we can go anywhere” as one of his examples, and closed the passage: “the chorus of melodies that keep welling up across these songs sounds like the voice of a wish sent up on that belief.”

The song’s sound was placed in the group’s own line by Kwibi, at the same outlet. Writing about ‘Everglow’ in his review of Ode to Love on 12 May 2026, he said that “the surging melody and the bursting sound of ‘Everglow’ carry on the line of ‘Songbird’, and also sound like an homage to SHINee’s ‘Hitchhiking’”. It is a sentence that settles this single’s place while accounting for what the later album inherited.

Among the tracks

‘Songbird’ is the song both pieces point at. Seukwip read its words as one strand of the wishing the group has sung since its debut, and Kwibi took its surging melody and big, bursting sound as the marker by which to explain the album two years later. This desk found no review of the B-side ‘Tears Are Falling’.

Around it

Three months later, on 24 September 2024, the first mini album Steady followed.