Talk & Talk

The record

Talk & Talk is a special single album by fromis_9, released on 1 September 2021. It carries one track, ‘Talk & Talk’.

The album introduction calls the song a spin-off of ‘WE GO’, the title track of the previous single album. The same page says a scene from the ‘WE GO’ music video is picked up again to tie the two together.

It is the first record the group made after changing agencies. Sports Kyunghyang reported that fromis_9 moved from Off The Record Entertainment to PLEDIS Entertainment on 16 August, and that the early-September comeback was the first work done with PLEDIS. The music video went up on the HYBE LABELS official channel rather than on the group’s own, as the earlier ones had.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지), a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the song on 17 October 2021 in the monthly column it gives to the singles of the month before. Two notes are attached to this one.

Simdyang tied the song to the two that came before it. The group’s “Little Society, realised from ‘Feel Good’ onwards, passes through ‘WE GO’ — which sidesteps the pandemic blues with a contactless charm — and carries the same keynote into a closely related ‘Talk & Talk’”, Simdyang wrote. The bounce the song and its routine put across is “a new weapon in their hands, even without any aggressive claim on their generation”, the same note adds, reading the collision between the corded telephone in the video and a routine that mimes holding a flat smartphone as the device that makes that bounce funnier. It closes on the pleasant flutter heard in the ringback tones that fill the chorus.

Yaemi, writing on the same page, took up the arrangement and the performance. Yaemi called it “a song that adds a freshness of synth sound and backing vocals, on the same line as ‘WE GO’”, and added that “the high register still pops, and the calmer low register used here and there recalls the feel of early autumn”. The point routine that frames a hand holding a phone carries on the everyday quality of the previous record, the note says, and “the performance is striking too, splitting nine members into threes and shifting the formations dynamically to use that many people to effect”.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the record at number 28 on its monthly album chart for September 2021. The song entered the Digital Chart at number 97 in week 36 (29 August to 4 September), the week of release.