We Young

The record

We Young is NCT DREAM’s first mini album, released on 17 August 2017 with six tracks. The title track shares the record’s name. It follows the first single album The First by six months.

The album introduction on Bugs describes the title track as an up-tempo tropical house track marked by clear guitar and brass, and says kenzie worked on it with the British writing team LDN Noise. The same text credits the member Mark on the lyrics of four tracks, and presents the closing ‘Trigger the Fever’ as the official song of the FIFA U-20 World Cup Korea 2017, for which the group served as ambassadors.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) ran the record as two writers’ short notes in ‘1st Listen’, its column on the records of mid-August 2017. Mimyo placed the group where it is “writing anew the boy who is clear without aggression”, and separated what a summer record of this kind is expected to do from what this one does. “If you say a summer album on a low-teen concept, the first thing that comes to mind might be a hyperactivity that leaps without end, but the four songs apart from the bonus track are all rather calm,” the note reads.

The same writer described the title track as “a rare tropical track that, far from removing ‘wildness’, shows it at a fairly high content by K-pop standards”, and read the way that noise stays in the background as the song’s design. He closed the note calling it “a record with cleverness and ambition in it, one that turns the puzzlement of the debut — what on earth are they trying to do — into a large expectation”.

Simdyang, in the same column, pointed at what separates this record from the ones before it. “I thought the sentiment of the early teens would repeat endlessly like a tape, but this feels like an album that has stepped one pace from boy toward adult,” the note reads, and it adds: “It is fresh, but what runs across every track is a lyricism, and that is what makes it striking.”

Among the tracks

Simdyang named two of the b-sides: “‘La La Love’ is given a briskness and ‘Walk You Home’, a song that rewrites your memories, a romance — so listen to the record to the end.” The album introduction on Bugs describes ‘La La Love’ as a funky pop track built on guitar, Rhodes piano and a swing drum rhythm, and ‘Walk You Home’ as a mid-tempo acoustic song led by a quiet guitar; Mark is credited on both lyrics.

The bonus track ‘Trigger the Fever’ is the song the same introduction gives as the official song of the FIFA U-20 World Cup Korea 2017, and it sits sixth on the record. Mimyo set it apart from the other four in that note and wrote that holding the two against each other is where you glimpse the direction the group will grow in.

Afterwards

The second mini album We Go Up followed on 3 September 2018.