The First

The record

The First is NCT DREAM’s first single album, released on 9 February 2017 with five tracks. The title track is ‘My First and Last’. It follows the debut single Chewing Gum by six months, and carries that song again, in Korean and in Chinese, as the last two tracks.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as a pop track marked by a catchy melody, and says the lyric is a declaration that a first love will be made to be the last. The same text credits the member Mark on the rap lyric and names August Rigo, Justin Davey and Ryan S. Jhun as its writers. Of the third track, ‘Dunk Shot’, it says that kenzie arranged a song Lee Seung-hwan released in 1993 into pop rock.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as two writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of early February 2017. Writing about the title track as a recording, Mimyo called it “a song tuned very finely indeed”, and set down how that tuning works: “It holds the tension of looking as though it will and will not hand over the bright, clear image of NCT Dream that anyone would think of, and it does that not by substituting something else to build anticipation but by layering opposing material in so that the song is ‘interrupted’.”

The same writer read the result as complexity rather than display. “Call it flashy and it is flashy, but rather than a flashiness meant to look good it is a ‘complication’, like the intermittent moments of spotting someone through a gap in the crowd in a hectic square,” the note reads, and it closes: “There is no other way to put it than a very tricky method, and I judge this to have come out a fairly successful result.”

Among the tracks

The third track, ‘Dunk Shot’, is a cover of a song Lee Seung-hwan released in 1993. Idology’s Haemchwa spent longest on that choice. “Covering Lee Seung-hwan’s ‘Dunk Shot’ is at once unexpected and a choice you cannot imagine being better suited to the team’s colour, and through Kenzie’s arrangement it has become a song that fits them completely,” the note reads, and it adds: “Listening to it against the original should be an interesting experience too.” Of the debut song carried over, the same writer noted: “‘Chewing Gum’, included here again, is still as enjoyable as it was.”

The second track is the Chinese version of the title track. The album introduction on Bugs credits its Chinese lyric to Arys Chien.

Afterwards

The first mini album We Young followed on 17 August 2017, and the second, We Go Up, came in September the year after.