Velvet Summer

The record

Velvet Summer is the summer mini album Red Velvet released on 3 August 2026, five tracks led by ‘Surfin’ Boy’. It is their first record as a full group since Cosmic in June 2024, two years and two months earlier.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as a dance track joining a languid bossa nova guitar, an unhurried reggae rhythm and a house groove, and says Joy wrote the words on her own, remembering the hottest summer spent with someone who mattered. The same text presents the other four as a pop dance song about a night drive in summer, ‘Hot Girls Cold Vibe’; a reinterpretation of ‘Lujon’ by the American film composer Henry Mancini, ‘Orchestra’; a mid-tempo pop song, ‘Hula Hoop’; and a closing track Joy again wrote alone, ‘Hawaii’.

Reviews

IZM’s Park Si-hoon reviewed the title track a fortnight after release. The way he places it is visual. Opening with “the skin the warm wind brushes past is ticklish”, he wrote that “the new song, with the primary-coloured melody of ‘Red Flavor’ and its pouring sunlight stripped away, heads for a beach where the evening glow has settled”.

The same piece traces how the song steps around the conventions of a summer single. “As the very title < Velvet Summer > suggests, the strangeness of a mood unlike the earlier ones lasts only a moment. What breaks out right after — a thick chorus meeting the lively rhythm of bossa nova — takes the heavy air of a tropical night into its arms pleasantly.” He added that “in an arrangement that turns over the typicality most summer songs have piled up, the name Red Velvet, with its double image, is exactly apt”.

Of how the song is built he wrote: “Although the weight is in practice loaded onto the chorus, the music is unexpectedly steady.” He noted that “the verses, which draw out a wistful feeling, are given restrained melodies to match, while the bridge that announces the climax puts the group’s firm singing to work, controlling the pace”, and closed: “Their own way of enjoying summer on a gentle heat alone. Sometimes the hotter memory is left by dusk rather than by midday.”

Among the tracks

‘Orchestra’ is the song on this record with the clearest source. By the album introduction it reinterprets Henry Mancini’s ‘Lujon’ for a contemporary ear, layering classical instruments over an unhurried rhythm for an exotic air. The same text says the lyric compares the changing feelings of two people falling in love on a deepening summer night to an orchestral performance, and follows the harmony to its completion like a film.

‘Hot Girls Cold Vibe’ is a pop dance track built on an addictive bass and guitar with a turn in the beat. The album introduction says it carries the plain confidence of women out on a summer night drive, and everything from a friendship that holds them up to the flutter of being in love.

The closing ‘Hawaii’ is the second song Joy wrote alone. The album introduction says it puts down a hard reality and heavy worries for a moment and meets again the childhood dream and freedom of someone who might as well be in Hawaii, ending the record on a plain comfort and a quiet trace.