Steady

The record

Steady is NCT WISH’s first mini album, released on 24 September 2024 with seven tracks. The title track shares the record’s name.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, says the record carries the intent to continue the moments the group has had since its debut, and places it after the two singles WISH and Songbird.

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 record, WISH and Songbird. Seukwip summed the group’s songs up as “the melancholy of a wish” and drew his examples at length from this album’s lyrics. The group, he wrote, “goes on living its days against a green star, alongside the friends it shares a midsummer daydream with, without falling into despair after the ghost friend it played with turned into that green star and left”, and added: “the chorus of melodies that keep welling up across these songs sounds like the voice of a wish sent up on that belief.”

Two days later the same outlet put the title track’s video in ‘Music Video Picks of 2024’. Seukwip wrote there that it renders “mourning rather than memory, and this brightly”, and pointed at “the catch in the lyric of forever ringing out over a video that mourns an ending”.

The record’s place was set out again two years later by Kwibi, at the same outlet. In his review of Ode to Love on 12 May 2026 he wrote of that album’s title track that “‘Ode to Love’ is plainly an expanded edition of ‘Steady’, and at the same time feels like a reinterpretation of H.O.T. and Super Junior’s ‘Haengbok’”.

Among the tracks

‘3 Minutes’ is the song a later piece looked back at. Jeong Gi-yeop of IZM, reviewing poppop on 18 April 2025, pointed at that album’s ‘Melt inside my pocket’ and wrote that it is, “together with ‘3 Minutes’ on the previous record, a standout achievement optimised for WISH’s own character”, adding that both songs have lyrics that line up with the image the group presents and help the listener into it.

The title track was taken up by Seukwip and Kwibi from two directions, words and sound. Seukwip read the resolve of its refrain and its wishes phrased as negatives as carrying a strange unease, while Kwibi treated the song as the form the group’s first full-length album later widened.

Around it

The second mini album poppop followed in April 2025, and the third, COLOR, in September of that year.