THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT

The record

THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT is a mini album ATEEZ released on 29 July 2022 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘Guerrilla’, and the record opens a third series after TREASURE and FEVER.

The album introduction carried by Bugs sets the record somewhere “emotions are controlled and neither happiness nor sadness can be felt”. People who have got their feelings back gather underground in a colourless city and begin to move “with music that will open the eyes of those who have closed them, with dancing that resembles the memory of being alive”. The same text introduces ‘Guerrilla’ as a song marked by beat changes and a psychedelic sound. The record followed the group’s first arena world tour of Korea, North America, Europe and Japan, and the introduction puts the audience for that tour at 180,000.

Reviews

The idol-pop webzine Idology (아이돌로지) reviewed the record on 12 August 2022. The writer is Mano.

The review starts from the dictionary meaning of the word guerrilla and reads the song’s resistance as aimed at the “wall” in its lyric. Of the album as a whole Mano wrote that “the story is persuasive enough on its own, but what makes that persuasion possible above all is a musical coherence running through the whole album”. Two things are named as its virtues: “that the message and the fictional world are direct and clear without being childish or monotonous, and that this heavy, serious message and world are smartly offset by music that is not only heavy.” The closing sentence: “may their ‘thunder-like’ songs and dancing go on shaking this world hard.”

The music webzine IZM reviewed the record in September 2022. Baek Jong-gwon took the work with the production team first, writing that “the producers sharpen the strong, electronic-based hip-hop style they have held to from the start”, and describing the choice of hard-style EDM over comfortable melody as “a line that shores the group’s direction up thoroughly even at the cost of a barrier to entry”. The review calls what the record reaches “a musical achievement by a group that had drawn attention for performance”.

Billboard put the record on its list of the 25 best K-pop albums of 2022, dated 30 December 2022. The entry begins “ATEEZ’s confidence in their sound has never been more apparent”, and says the record “elevates the band’s hard-hitting hip-hop with new electronic influences and heavy synth-pop sounds, kickstarting a new musical era for the boy band”.

Among the tracks

The song all three writers take up is ‘Guerrilla’. Mano quotes the line “dance, break that wall with our feel” and reads it as the group “declaring that they will break this ‘wall’ through dancing and singing, with a feeling and a sense that are their own”. Billboard wrote that “while nearly every track on EP.1 is animated and energetic enough to pass as a single, having ‘Guerrilla’ as its centerpiece single lets the eight members’ personalities shine best”.

On the opening track, ‘PROPAGANDA’, Mano wrote that it “cries out ‘world, wake up’ in the imperative and then lists the things to be abolished one by one — lies, control, discipline, hatred, selfishness”. The album introduction sums the same song up as a broadcast that runs the same content every night and an “eye in the sky” that watches, and Baek wrote that “once the fast-moving intro ‘Propaganda’ stamps the album’s concept in, the tracks that follow take the baton with a sense of unity”.

The tracks that follow are scenes in that story. Mano set them out in order: a “grey dystopia” opens up in ‘Sector 1’ and ‘Cyberpunk’, and in ‘The Ring’ the group swears “in a thunder-like sound” to change the world before witnessing the new one in ‘New World’. Billboard called those four “different chapters of an epic movie saga”. Baek wrote that because one team handled the whole record, it is “a smooth build with nothing jutting out or feeling foreign”.

Numbers

Billboard reported in a story dated 9 August 2022 that this is the group’s first top-ten album on the Billboard 200. In a chart story dated 13 January 2023 the same outlet said the record had reached number two on the Top Album Sales chart in 2022.

What came next

The THE WORLD series continues with THE WORLD EP.2 : OUTLAW and THE WORLD EP.FIN : WILL. The order through to the GOLDEN HOUR series is set out in Who Are ATEEZ?.