Summer Magic

The record

Summer Magic is Red Velvet’s summer mini album, released on 6 August 2018 with seven tracks — six new songs and a bonus track. The title track is ‘Power Up’. It is the second summer record after The Red Summer a year earlier, and the bonus track is an English version of ‘Bad Boy’, the title track of The Perfect Red Velvet.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as up-tempo pop dance marked by bouncing eight-bit game sounds and a cute hook, with a lyric saying that playing hard and taking on energy makes work go well too. By the same text ‘한 여름의 크리스마스 (With You)’ is an R&B pop song holding the feelings of both summer and winter, ‘Mr. E’ a track whose sounds suggest standing in a jungle, and ‘Hit That Drum’ a piece recalling a samba festival in South America.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as four writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of early August 2018. Mano wrote that the album crosses between a beach in Hawaii, a rainforest and the middle of a festival in Rio de Janeiro, and that “it is rather welcome that, for all its variety and colour, it has not forgotten the album’s own coherence”. He picked out in particular that even the bonus track melts into the record without strain. Simdyang wrote of a running order in which “different sounds and genres are mixed together” that “it widens the spectrum of summer and there is pleasure in the listening”, and that the record “turned summer into an interesting season through a reading that is not the obvious one”.

Mimyo, in the same column, read the record against the group’s earlier work as having the grain of a summer special mini album, and wrote that “it is good to hear the way ‘한 여름의 크리스마스’, ‘Mosquito’ and ‘Blue Lemonade’, placed as if in alternation, add the particular grace that made last year’s velvet widely persuasive”. Yu Je-sang chose the mini album as the column’s ‘Pick!’ and wrote that “‘Power Up’ carries the marks of the group’s earlier hits intact while being light and undemanding to listen to”.

Kim Do-heon of IZM pointed to the record’s cheerful tunes: “This album too makes active use of summer as a common denominator, and its enjoyable tunes pop like popping candy.” He wrote that “‘한여름의 크리스마스’, which puts a scoop of a stirring message over a cool moombahton rhythm, shows an intuitive melodic line, and ‘Mr. E’, crossing a quick-stepping verse with a bold chorus, shows practised pacing”, and closed the paragraph running through the tracks: “There is not a song to miss.”

Among the tracks

Of the title track ‘Power Up’, Idology’s Mimyo wrote that it is “a song to shout and run about to, one that could turn a floor over”, and that the sound is built around a low-end beat, leaving the mid-range clear for the voices. Kim Do-heon of IZM wrote that the singing on it “functions like a chiptune sample in a playful video game”. Tássia Assis of NME placed the song 59th in the 127-song retrospective the outlet published on 1 August 2024, asking what other group could make a chorus that goes “Ba-banana ba-ba-banana-nana” sound neither childish nor indecent.

‘Hit That Drum’ is the song three writers put forward together. Idology’s Mimyo wrote that “rather than a rollercoaster of rises and falls, its structure pours into an evident destination, and that gives considerable pleasure”; Mano called it “a strange hybrid mutation of samba and K-pop”; Simdyang wrote that “‘Hit That Drum’, hammering away and letting out adrenaline, took my heart easily”. Assis placed it 56th in her retrospective, hearing a hint of electro samba in it.

‘Mosquito’ and ‘Blue Lemonade’ are the two tracks Simdyang recommended together, calling the first “a witty reading of summer’s unwanted guest” and the second “an outro as clean as a bite of lemon”. Mano wrote of ‘Blue Lemonade’ that it is “gentle and cool, as if mixing a sweet sea scent with a sour lemon taste, exactly as the lyric says”, and Assis wrote that it conjures beautiful imagery over laid-back, nostalgic R&B. Kim Do-heon picked out ‘Mosquito’ as the track that melts the different grains of the two preceding albums into one.

‘Mr. E’ and ‘한 여름의 크리스마스 (With You)’ were named on several pages too. Assis placed ‘Mr. E’ 49th in her retrospective, writing that “Red Velvet’s oddness is at their best when paired with a tongue-in-cheek title and jungle noises”, and placed ‘한 여름의 크리스마스’ 98th, reading it as a song thinking of a Christmas that falls in summer in the southern hemisphere.

Afterwards

The fifth mini album RBB followed four months later and closed the group’s 2018.