SPIN OFF : FROM THE WITNESS

The record

SPIN OFF : FROM THE WITNESS is the first single album ATEEZ released, on 30 December 2022, with five tracks. The title track is ‘HALAZIA’. It sits between THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT, five months earlier, and THE WORLD EP.2 : OUTLAW the following year, but it is not the next chapter of that series.

The album introduction carried by Bugs calls the record a “SPIN OFF special edition, one step away from the [THE WORLD] series”. The same text puts the narrator at “an anonymous witness whose identity cannot even be known”, and says the story read through his eyes gives the listener “a new experience, as though you had walked into a short film”. The witness’s note reproduced in the introduction is signed “Anonymous A(y), 2022”.

Three of the five tracks are remixes of earlier songs, and the album introduction names who made them: June One of Glen Check, the Eden-ary team who have long worked with the producer Eden, and the electronic band IDIOTAPE.

Reviews

The music webzine IZM took the record up in June 2023, inside its single review of the group’s next title track, ‘BOUNCY’. The writer is Baek Jong-gwon. Having set out THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT as a turning point, he wrote of this record that “the remix album Spin Off : From The Witness that followed also reaffirmed that direction, drawing on leading Korean electronica artists — the producer Eden, with whom the group has worked for a long time, June One of Glen Check, IDIOTAPE”.

Among the tracks

The album introduction opens the title track, ‘HALAZIA’, with “the whisper of a small blue bird begun inside a cold world”, and names its marks as “the harmony of a bass line that carries a heavy resonance and elaborate sound effects”.

The three remixes each come from a different original. ‘WIN (June One Remix)’ remakes the 2019 song ‘WIN’ as EDM in June One’s hands; ‘I’m The One (Eden-ary Remix)’ returns to a 2020 song with the Eden-ary team; and ‘Take Me Home (IDIOTAPE Remix)’ lays IDIOTAPE’s sound over a 2021 song. The introduction says the closing track, ‘Outro : Blue Bird’, is where the witness’s story ends.

Numbers

Billboard reported in a chart story dated 13 January 2023 that the record entered the Top Album Sales chart dated 14 January at number two. The same story said 40,000 copies were sold in the United States in the week ending 5 January, 39,000 of them CDs, and that this was the group’s third top-ten entry on that chart.

The album introduction for THE WORLD EP.2 : OUTLAW, which followed, says the record spent three weeks on the Billboard 200.

What came next

The THE WORLD series continues with THE WORLD EP.2 : OUTLAW and THE WORLD EP.FIN : WILL. The order of the series and the line-up are set out in Who Are ATEEZ?.