봄여름가을겨울 (Still Life)봄여름가을겨울봄여름가을겨울
BIGBANG's digital single of 5 April 2022 and their first new song since 'Flower Road' four years earlier. NME and The Singles Jukebox wrote about it, and it was number one on Circle Chart's Digital Chart in its first week.
‘봄여름가을겨울 (Still Life)’ is a digital single BIGBANG released at midnight on 5 April 2022. Reporting the agency’s announcement on 24 March, The Korea Herald wrote that it would be the group’s first release since ‘Flower Road’ in 2018. The track runs three minutes and eight seconds, and the music video went up on the group’s official channel the day before release, on 4 April. It stayed their newest song until ‘BiiiG’ in August 2026.
KUSH wrote the music with VVN, Vince, G-Dragon and T.O.P, and G-Dragon wrote the lyrics with T.O.P and KUSH. KUSH arranged the song with Seo Won-jin and 24, who also play it: Seo on guitar, KUSH on piano, 24 on keyboard. YG Entertainment’s album introduction describes it as a song built on an organic, warm band sound, and picks out the opening lyric, which follows the passing of time and the turn of the seasons from spring through to winter.
NME ran Angela Patricia Suacillo’s review on 6 April 2022 and gave the song five stars out of five. She wrote about what it sets out to say: “Big Bang’s much-anticipated comeback single ‘Still Life’ may not provide the answers most have been clamouring for, but it does want to let listeners know one thing: they’re not the same men they were four years ago, and they’re all the better for it.” The same review continues: “Through the lens of the passing seasons, ‘Still Life’ honors the distance between where the group were four years ago and where they are now.”
Suacillo heard the arrangement as soft rock out of the 1970s and 1980s, and read it as a setting that brings out how differently each member sounds. “The same laid-back arrangement that brings out Taeyang and Daesung’s rich vocals,” she wrote, “also leaves a lot of room for rapid-fire introspection from G-Dragon and T.O.P.”
The Singles Jukebox, where a panel of British and American music writers each file a note of their own on one single, covered the song on 21 May 2022. Anna Katrina Lockwood did not read it as a farewell. “I understand why so many people have read this as a farewell song from the mighty Big Bang, but I don’t believe that to be true,” she wrote. “There’s a doleful, valedictory atmosphere, to be sure, but to me it’s the feeling of being in your mid-thirties and realizing how many books you’ve already closed; the friendships that have morphed and lapsed; the internal worries that have turned into external — family, work, possessions.”
On the playing and the singing she wrote: “The noodling guitar and chanted la-la-las are amusingly melodramatic and T.O.P is tremendously good, as are both vocalists.” She closed on the timing: “It’s not exactly the party anthem that we know best from Big Bang, but ‘Still Life’ sure feels satisfyingly apt at this time.”
Circle Chart placed the song at number one on its Digital Chart for week 15 of 2022 (3 to 9 April), the week of release. It was at number one again in week 16 (10 to 16 April) and at number two in week 17 (17 to 23 April). ‘LAST DANCE’, from 2016, was back on that week-16 chart at number 132.
Billboard entered the song at number nine on its Global 200 chart dated 16 April 2022, and it was at number 32 the week after.
Real Sound reported on 8 April that the song took number one on the iTunes charts of 33 countries and territories, Japan among them, immediately after release, and number one on the real-time charts of the main Korean streaming services, including Melon, FLO, Genie, Bugs and VIBE.
Claims in this story link to official or primary sources.
G-Dragon put out his first record, Heartbreaker, on 18 August 2009, and followed it with the mini album One Of A Kind in 2012, the full-length album COUP D'ETAT in 2013 and the mini album KWON JI YONG in 2017. Here are the four, by date, by format and by what was recorded at the time.
