The Red

The record

The Red is Red Velvet’s first full-length album, released on 9 September 2015 with 10 tracks. The title track is ‘Dumb Dumb’. It puts the red half of the group’s name forward and follows Ice Cream Cake by six months.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record carries the colours the word red suggests, and names Kenzie, LDN Noise, Daniel “Obi” Klein, Hwang Hyun and JINBO among those who worked on it. By the same text the title track is an up-tempo pop dance track marked by an addictive hook and a groove-led beat, written by the British team LDN Noise.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as three writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of early September 2015. Kim Yun-ha pointed to the airtight production and the odd, high-contrast artwork before writing, “Anyway — it is excellent,” and closed her note: “Do not miss the last track, ‘Cool World’, which adds a spoonful of wistfulness to the emotional touch of retro synth-pop.” Mimyo read the album in halves, the first pairing a less popular taste with a modern electronic sound and the second reassuring the listener with a tested sweetness, and gave the column’s ‘Discovery!’ to the record so that people would hear it whole.

Jeff Benjamin of Billboard placed the album seventh in the outlet’s 10 best K-pop albums of 2015, published on 31 December 2015. He wrote that the group went fully red on their first full-length and made “one of the year’s most enjoyable and experimental pop LPs”, adding: “The brassy ‘Dumb Dumb’ brings funk-pop to a bizarre new land while standouts like ‘Red Dress’, ‘Oh Boy’ and ‘Cool World’ effortlessly blend the year’s trendiest sounds (synth-pop, trap, ’90s dance) into easily deliciously digestible confections.”

Among the tracks

The writer who spent longest on the title track is Idology’s Masitneun Pahita, who published a separate piece on ‘Dumb Dumb’ on 14 September 2015. Starting from a video filled with images of endless copying and mass production, he read the lyric as an idol looking at idols. “A song that thinks about the self of being an idol is probably Red Velvet’s ‘Dumb Dumb’ alone.” He set the song’s place down as “a major turning point — an idol with a self that can speak about itself”. Mimyo of the same outlet wrote in his note that “if ‘Time Slip’ moves between the two worlds more legibly, ‘Dumb Dumb’ is exceptionally deft at exactly that”. Tássia Assis of NME placed the song first in the 127-song retrospective the outlet published on 1 August 2024, pointing to its handling of repetition and its Michael Jackson rap and calling it “a lesson on how to do a lot with a little, and spin old cliches into an entirely new opus”.

The closing track ‘Cool World’ is the song weiv chose for its 2015 songs of the year. Kim Yun-ha opened her entry by asking whether the song might be called a small revolution by girls, and wrote that she had not expected to meet a conversation with oneself this deep in a girl group’s song. After noting the beat by the producer Daniel “Obi” Klein, she closed: “This is a song I want to fold up neatly and hand in secret to every girl holding out in this time of ours.” Assis placed the same song 51st in her retrospective and read it as an ode to time alone and to the pleasure of one’s own company.

Assis covered five more tracks from the album. She described ‘Oh Boy’ as a B-side of “uncomplicated glory, with belts for ages and marked piano rhythm”, wrote that the back-and-forth of ‘Time Slip’ mimics falling in and out of a sweet dream, and found in ‘Red Dress’ a lyric that knows exactly what it wants and how to get it. ‘Huff n Puff’, with its lined-up drums, unison chants, cartoonish synths and wobbly horns, she called a fitting intro to the album’s factory theme, and of ‘Campfire’ she wrote that its bassline is “impossibly satisfying”.

Afterwards

The Velvet turned to the other half of the name six months later, and Russian Roulette followed that September.