TREASURE EP.3 : One To All

The record

TREASURE EP.3 : One To All is ATEEZ’s third mini album, released on 10 June 2019 with six tracks. ‘ILLUSION’ and ‘WAVE’ were both title tracks and both music videos went up the same day. The record came in the group’s eighth month since the debut.

The album introduction carried by Bugs presents the record as a turn in the series. Where the first two were a rough, punishing adventure, this one holds “the bright, positive energy of eight boys and a new concept for ATEEZ”, and the double title track offers “two concepts of ATEEZ inside the same summer”. The same text introduces ‘ILLUSION’ as a hip-hop-rhythm song with playful piano and brass hits over it, and ‘WAVE’ as a mash-up of moombahton and country guitar. Production was led by EDEN with a team of BUDDY, LEEZ and Ollounder, and the introduction credits the leader Kim Hong-joong on the lyrics and composition of ‘AURORA’.

The introduction also records where the group was standing at release: it had just finished a tour of five cities in the Americas, Los Angeles and New York among them, and ten European countries including London and Paris, and says every show sold out. The order of the series and the line-up are set out in Who Are ATEEZ?.

Reviews

The idol-pop webzine Idology (아이돌로지) picked this record’s opening track, ‘UTOPIA’, in 「결산 2019 : 놓치기 아까운 수록곡」 — B-sides of 2019 too good to miss — dated 27 March 2020. The selection note was written by Mano.

Mano called it “a song that lets you glimpse a charm a little apart from the ‘spicy K-pop’ this team is known for”, and wrote that “a bright, up-tempo dance number is something they had never shown before, which makes it rather unusual for the group”. The note goes on: “what is striking is that it tells the ‘adventure toward the treasure’ the TREASURE series has pressed all along, in a quite different grain and yet keeping its consistency.” The closing line was “a cool, clear track that suits the summer it came out in very well”.

Among the tracks

‘UTOPIA’ is not a title track but the track that opens the record. The album introduction presents it as an EDM song carrying an ideal that “sprints without limit toward a utopia seen in a dream”, and says the drop in the chorus gives the feeling of “breaking through a reality boxed in by prejudice and arriving at utopia”. The place where Mano brought the song back up a year later was, likewise, a column for B-sides rather than title tracks.

The two title tracks treat the same summer differently. By the album introduction, ‘ILLUSION’ sings an experience on an unknown island, while ‘WAVE’ shouts, in front of a wave rearing up, that the moment and the adventure are there to be enjoyed. The closing track, ‘Dancing Like Butterfly Wings’, is a mid-tempo rock song, and the introduction says it carries the hope that “though the beating of our wings now may be as small as a butterfly’s, it will become a great wind and reach the dream at last”.

Numbers

Billboard reported in a chart story dated 20 January 2020 that this record reached number eight on the US World Albums chart in the summer of 2019. In a story dated 17 October 2019, the same outlet wrote that the first full-length album released that month had the group’s second-best sales week in America, and named this record’s opening week as the one that had sold slightly more.

What came next

The TREASURE series continues four months later with the first full-length album, TREASURE EP.FIN : All To Action, which cuts the double title track back to one.