We Boom

The record

We Boom is NCT DREAM’s third mini album, released on 26 July 2019 with six tracks. The title track is ‘BOOM’. It follows We Go Up by eleven months.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record moves across urban pop, trap, Motown, hip-hop and pop, and describes ‘BOOM’ as an urban pop track of minimal construction led by a unique, simple synth and beat. The same text says the lyric carries a message about moving toward a dream, and credits the members Jeno, Jaemin and Jisung on the lyrics of three tracks.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) covered the title track on two of its 2019 year-end pages. On the page choosing the year’s performances, Jo Eun-jae read the choreography of ‘BOOM’ as following the shape of the song: “Matched to a song built so that the chorus sung together weighs and lands harder than any member’s own part, the group dance too is in better time than it has ever been.”

The same writer pointed at where that timing shows most. “You can feel that they are more together in the freely moving freestyle stretches than in the movements matched to a knife’s angle, which tells you this team’s teamwork is running high,” the entry reads, and it adds that the group is “working to show a new repertoire and a new phase”.

On the page choosing the year’s lyrics, the same writer picked one line from ‘BOOM’ — “the child who danced with an innocent face now smiles and sets this track on fire” — and called it “a sentence that gathers up everything NCT Dream has shown from the debut until now and declares their growth”.

Among the tracks

The closing track ‘Dream Run’ is the one Squib chose on the same page. He set down two lines from it — “even when today goes, this feeling will stay just like this forever / even when this night goes, our story will keep going” — and wrote: “In the middle of all that, ‘Dream Run’ simply smiles clear.” The album introduction on Bugs describes the song as a funky Motown track that folds the titles and lyrics of the group’s earlier songs into itself.

‘119’ is the track the same introduction describes as a trap song marked by a groovy beat and its chorus, with Jeno and Jaemin credited on the lyric. The same text calls ‘Best Friend’ an urban pop track built on a brisk piano melody and an 808 bass line, its lyric — written with Jeno, Jaemin and Jisung — set in a conversation with a long-standing friend. The fourth track, ‘Bye My First…’, it describes as a pop song whose guitar line suits the summer.

Afterwards

Reload followed nine months later, on 29 April 2020, and the group’s first full-length album Hot Sauce came in May 2021.