TREASURE EP.FIN : All To Action

The record

TREASURE EP.FIN : All To Action is ATEEZ’s first full-length album, released on 8 October 2019 with 11 tracks. The title track is ‘WONDERLAND’. It is the fourth record in the TREASURE series and arrived about a year after the debut.

The album introduction carried by Bugs frames the record as the series looking back on itself: a place where the members “look back on the time they have run so hard and ask why they are here and why this journey has to go on”. The same text presents ‘WONDERLAND’ as “the finished form of the genres the TREASURE series has shown” and “an ATEEZ march ringing out along the journey toward the treasure”, led by grand lead brass and drums. Unlike the three records before it, this one has a single title track.

Reviews

Billboard placed the album 23rd in “The 25 Best K-pop Albums of 2019”, dated 31 December 2019. The entry says “ATEEZ’s first full-length album is a true trove of musical riches”, and that it “leans into the group’s prior releases, keeping their typical introspective bombast while showing new sides to the team with the infusion of new musical styles”. Songs flitting between genres create, the entry says, “an album that’s almost cinematic in feel”, and it closes: “it’s a fitting finale for their debut album series, and preps ATEEZ for a new stage of their career.”

The idol-pop webzine Idology (아이돌로지) picked ‘WONDERLAND’ in 「결산 2019 : 퍼포먼스 Pick!」 — the performances of 2019 — dated 1 March 2020. Mano, who wrote the note, called the staging “a work you could call the summit even among the ATEEZ performances that stand out for an explosive energy that overwhelms the viewer”.

Among the tracks

What Mano picked out in ‘WONDERLAND’ is the relation between the choreography and the song. The note says that “the choreography repeats tension and release along a song that runs violently and then drifts easily in between, and never loses a taut hold on it”, and that “the marching-band sound that marks the song has put a lot of stamping into it — in the practice video the floor and the camera shake hard because of it”. The high point Mano named comes after the bridge: “the unison section where every member and dancer performs to a marching-band sound like a military band on the move, as though their bodies might come apart.”

The same outlet picked a single line from the sixth track, ‘WIN’, in 「결산 2019 : 인상적인 가사」 — the lyrics of 2019 — dated 18 March 2020. The line Mano quoted is “our ship only goes one way”. The note calls it “a punchline shouted with bravado, after a careful-sounding request to become a comrade takes you aboard the moment you are off guard”, and says that “this nine-syllable sentence, laid on a theme that repeats throughout the song, is addictive in melody and rhythm and sums up so precisely the story and identity a team represented by ‘pirates’ and ‘a search for treasure’ carries that it would do perfectly well as the group’s catchphrase”. The album introduction describes ‘WIN’ as a moombahton-styled song.

The two songs that open and close the album point at each other too: the first track is ‘End of the Beginning’ and the last is ‘Beginning of the End’, and Billboard’s entry set the pair either side of the record in describing it. Between them sits ‘Sunrise’, which the introduction says the leader Kim Hong-joong wrote and composed.

Numbers

Billboard reported in a chart story dated 17 October 2019 that ‘WONDERLAND’ entered the US World Digital Song Sales chart at number seven, the group’s highest-placed song to that date. It sold 1,000 copies in the week ending 10 October, the story says, and the previous best was ‘Say My Name’ at number eight that February.

The album entered the World Albums chart at number seven the same week, the group’s third top-ten entry there. It later reached number six, Billboard reported in a story dated 20 January 2020.

What came next

The TREASURE series closes three months later with TREASURE EPILOGUE : Action To Answer, whose title track ‘Answer’ is the subject of IZM’s first piece of writing about the group.