NCT

The record

NCT #127 WE ARE SUPERHUMAN is NCT 127’s fourth mini album, released on 24 May 2019 with six tracks. The title track is ‘Superhuman’. It is the first record since the repackage NCT #127 Regulate six months earlier.

SM Entertainment’s album introduction, carried on Bugs, describes the title track as “a complextro dance track bringing various EDM elements together”, and says the lyrics carry the message that anyone can be a superhuman by recognising their own potential and working at it with a positive mind. The same text names the producing team Social House, who worked on Ariana Grande’s ‘7 rings’ and ‘thank u, next’, along with Adrian McKinnon, the electronic musician TAK and the composer 1Take, and says Mark took part in writing the words.

Reviews

Idology’s Quibbie gave the record a review of its own on 16 September 2019. Leading with the making of the title track, he wrote that “‘Superhuman’ boasts a construction that stands out even among SM’s recent releases”, and that “it is hard not to be drawn in by the harmony that rings out clear the moment you play it”. After noting that the harmonic structure resembles the intro of f(x)’s ‘제트별’ (Jetbyeol) from 2012, he wrote that “over the field of complextro the producer TAK made by putting his speciality to work, the members float freely, each showing off his own timbre”.

The same writer set out what the record shares with the one before it and what it does not. Against ‘Regular’, he wrote, the music moves from rap-led latin trap to vocal-led electro pop and the imagery from the back streets of a cyberpunk Seoul to an imagined cyberspace, and yet both hold a sense of the future city “with the scent of retro faintly soaked into it”, so that “the effort to carry the group’s narrative on can be felt”.

Billboard placed ‘Highway to Heaven’ 16th in its 25 best K-pop songs of 2019, published on 29 December 2019. The entry says that “NCT 127’s power pop ballad soars in intensity alongside head-bopping percussion and sleek, infectious synths, showcasing the act’s dynamic vocals”.

Among the tracks

‘Highway to Heaven’ is the song three pieces put forward together. Quibbie wrote that “the lead single and first track ‘Highway to Heaven’ is on its own an excellent variation on NCT 127’s established urbanity”, and of the way the vocal members are placed at the front that “there is nothing at all to find fault with in a method that draws out a resource that was lying latent and realises the group’s character in another form”.

Idology also put the song in ‘B-sides too good to miss’ in its 2019 year-end series, published on 27 March 2020. Squib wrote that it “takes precise aim at North American taste as a song by Social House, who worked on many of Ariana Grande’s hit singles, and at the same time places at the front the vocal members who lend the track buoyancy, upgrading by one step the urbanity of the established ‘Neo City’ that a sophisticated sense of space stands for”, and called it “a song that deserves to be talked about more, in the North American media that has begun to bring K-pop in properly and in a K-pop industry keeping pace with that by taking on North American pop trends”. Billboard noted that the song came first as a B-side on the mini album and later as an all-English single, which was released on 17 July 2019.

The title track’s music video went into Idology’s ‘Music video picks’ for 2019, published on 4 March 2020. Third asked what comes of joining traditional SMP to NCT’s own neo quality and wrote that “the music video for ‘Superhuman’ is like an experiment set up to answer that question”, adding that “the visual of the dazzling lighting and the sleekly finished sets is a rather different shape from what NCT 127 had shown in their title songs until then, but the synergy of the song’s speed and its harmony pouring down like heavy rain against the images ends up making immersion and persuasion”.

The album introduction describes ‘아 깜짝이야 (FOOL)’ as pop dance about falling in love at first sight, ‘시차 (Jet Lag)’ as urban R&B pop that likens the feeling between the group and its fans to a difference in time zones, and ‘OUTRO : WE ARE 127’ as a track in which the members’ narration states the team’s identity.

Numbers

The album introduction for the second full-length, published in March the next year, says that with this mini album the group “reached number 11 on Billboard 200, the main album chart in the United States, and number six on the Artist 100”.

Around it

The second full-length album NCT #127 Neo Zone followed ten months later.