WALK

The record

WALK is NCT 127’s sixth full-length album, released on 15 July 2024. It carries eleven tracks and the title track is ‘삐그덕 (Walk)’ — 삐그덕 is the Korean word for a creak, the sound of a step that has gone slightly wrong. SM Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs says the album’s name holds both the path the group has walked and the path ahead, and calls the title track “a hip-hop number that gives off the feel of the early 2000s, with boom-bap drums, a retro guitar riff and synths all meeting”. The same text says it is the first time the group has taken on old-school hip-hop. The winter special single Be There For Me had arrived eight months earlier.

Reviews

IZM ran Jeong Gi-yeop’s album review in September 2024. He read the record as a time capsule — “the retro style put out in front with the group’s own colour, neo, pared back, and their own history written into the lyrics on top of that” — and wrote of the title track that “avoiding a full sound, they make the rhythm out of a rough beat and rapping, and bring out hip-hop’s own coarse side handsomely”. He closed by writing that the record “fills its running time without dragging and without anything jarring”, and that “a group whose very name carries Seoul’s longitude has ridden the 2024 wave of the Han River properly, in a year when vintage culture is in fashion”.

Mimyo took up the album in his column for Weekly Donga (주간동아) ten days after release. He wrote that the title track “comes across with quite an old-school hip-hop feel” and that “it is a song that is fun to listen to because of it”. Of the album as a whole: “The record offers a balance more assured than ever and a thrilling aural pleasure, in the crossing of fluent R&B vocals, the smooth and fantastical vocal harmony that is SM Entertainment’s own, and the coarse rapping.”

Billboard placed the record fifth on its list of the 25 best K-pop albums of 2024, published on 6 December 2024. “As always, the masterful production is in top form thanks to SM Entertainment’s elite squad behind the scenes,” wrote the critic who signed the entry A.W.

Among the tracks

‘Orange Seoul’ and ‘Pricey’ are the two songs both Korean pieces stop at. “The song where the Seoul they have reinterpreted in their own voices comes through best is ‘Orange Seoul’,” Jeong wrote, adding that “the full brass sound brings to mind of its own accord the sunset over a Han River bridge that the song describes”. He went on: “And then ‘Pricey’, which holds the centre firmly with the lively air that a bouncing bass, piano and guitar make, is outstanding too.” Mimyo grouped the same song with ‘No Clue’ — “songs like ‘No Clue’, with its crossing of bleak rapping and fluent R&B, or ‘Pricey’, where a house-style piano is laid over a funky beat to build an interesting vibe” — and wrote that the album “moves across genres, so that unlike sounds collide with one another, and gives freshness through that”. The album introduction describes ‘Orange Seoul’ as a song that likens the Seoul sky to paint as it turns to sunset. Billboard’s A.W. picked out the saxophone grooves of ‘Orange Seoul’, the dirty basslines of ‘Pricey’ and the noirish, neo-soul flutes of ‘Rain Drop’ as details to home in on.

Numbers

IZM included the record in the ten albums of its ‘2024 올해의 국내 앨범’, published on 15 December 2024. Lim Dong-yeop opened that entry with “they walk NCT 127’s own path”, and wrote that “the reason these packaged songs are gathered in one box and knit together organically lies in the high finish of each song”. Idology (아이돌로지) also included the record in ‘결산 2024 : ③올해의 앨범 16선’, in an entry that reprints, with its source marked, a passage of Mimyo’s Weekly Donga review above.