The Perfect Red Velvet

The record

The Perfect Red Velvet is the repackage of Red Velvet’s second full-length album, released on 29 January 2018. It adds ‘Bad Boy’, ‘All Right’ and ‘Time To Love’ to the nine songs of Perfect Velvet, which had come out two months earlier, for 12 tracks in all. The title track is ‘Bad Boy’.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as an R&B dance track on a hip-hop base, pointing to a groove-led synth melody and a weighty bass sound. By the same text The Stereotypes, Maxx Song, Whitney Phillips and Yoo Young-jin are among the writers, and the chorus carries sound effects — the click of heels, a police car — that suggest a scene. ‘All Right’ is introduced as up-tempo pop dance whose synths add a retro air, and ‘Time To Love’ as a mid-tempo R&B ballad about a love just beginning.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as three writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of late January 2018. Kim Young-dae wrote of the title track that “the close joining of the loose, unhurried rhythm of ‘Bad Boy’ and a short, addictive melody with impact has the cleanness one feels only in work made by the best”. Seodeu called the repackage “a result of which one could say without exaggeration that the colour of Red Velvet — loose and yet with something sombre in it, somewhere on a line running from ‘Automatic’ and the early ‘Be Natural’ — has been completed, as the word ‘Perfect’ in the album title suggests”.

weiv put the title track on its 2018 songs of the year list, published on 8 January 2019. Na Won-yeong wrote there that the repackage held “a pride in the sound that only Red Velvet can deliver, a confidence about the most perfect Red Velvet”, and that the attitude showed itself in ‘Bad Boy’.

Among the tracks

The writer who spent longest on ‘Bad Boy’ is weiv’s Na Won-yeong. Taking the sound first, he wrote that it “explores the hidden areas of the velvet concept again while making active use of a heavy-bassed trap it had not properly tried before, and even so the graceful vocal harmony and the polished synths carry the group’s own appeal on, more alluringly than ever”. After noting that the song’s unhurried attitude also shows in the lyric and the choreography, he closed: “‘Bad Boy’ reveals, in its most complete form, harmoniously and without reserve, the greatest possibility Red Velvet can deliver.”

Idology’s Oyo wrote of the same song’s construction that “‘Bad Boy’ takes as much force out and as much sound away as it can, and then builds the song from a few definite elements alone. A heavy bass makes the frame, and over it a groove-led synth melody branches out.” He added that the siren appearing briefly in the chorus adds interest. Tássia Assis of NME placed the song sixth in the 127-song retrospective the outlet published on 1 August 2024, writing that on this carefully crafted single “the spaciousness of dripping synths and snares keeps you on your toes, as the song dives deeper and deeper into darkness”, and that lightness breaks in when least expected, in the form of powerhouse vocals.

Of ‘All Right’, new to the repackage, Assis wrote in placing it 87th that “Retro Velvet goes full-force on this one, and that funky bassline is an invitation to dance”. She placed ‘Time To Love’ 114th, writing that the longing melancholy behind its verses is compelling.

Afterwards

The summer mini album Summer Magic followed six months later, carrying an English version of ‘Bad Boy’ as a bonus track.