WISH

The record

WISH is NCT WISH’s debut single, released on 28 February 2024. The title track ‘WISH’ and the B-side ‘Sail Away’ are each carried in a Korean and a Japanese version.

The album introduction on Bugs, written by SM Entertainment, gives the group’s catchphrase as “WISH for Our WISH” and names its six members as SION, RIKU, YUSHI, JAEHEE, RYO and SAKUYA.

Reviews

Lee Hong-hyeon of IZM, in a single review dated 1 March 2024, noted that KENZIE oversaw the production and that the hip-hop producer Dress worked on the track, then wrote that “the compromise between experiment and a popular approach is striking”. Of the song’s construction he wrote that “the extreme contrasts planted in each part move busily between classic hip-hop and dreamy mid-tempo R&B, and yet at the chorus a melody that lodges in the ear opens out cleanly and makes the song bear repeat listening”, and closed: “‘Wish’ holds the colour of NCT WISH, grown in the space where those meet.”

Idology (아이돌로지) named the group in ‘Rookies of the Year 2024’, published on 26 February 2025, and its selection note was written across this single and the two records that followed, Songbird and Steady. Seukwip opened with the word in the group’s name — “where NCT DREAM spoke of hope, NCT WISH sings of a wish” — and added that “unlike hope, a wish is necessarily in the subjunctive”. He wrote that “the music of NCT WISH, which at a glance looks nothing but bright, carries the melancholy of that wish”, and read the lyrics across the three records as resting on a belief in being together. He called the group “the flawless completion of the NCT universe, filling with an unbeatable infinity of wishing the heart of an NCT that had been given over to infinite outward expansion”.

Real Sound, the Japanese music site, covered the song in the 97th instalment of its K-pop new-release column ‘lit!’ on 14 April 2024. Takuo Matsumoto wrote that even without the talking point of this being the last NCT group, the debut song proves the group attractive enough on its own, and added that its polish had grown not only in performance and visuals but in sound.

Among the tracks

The opening of ‘WISH’ is the passage Matsumoto set out most precisely. He traced the twenty seconds in which a floating intro that samples ‘Love Is Here to Stay’ by the 1970s jazz vocal group The Singers Unlimited turns into a fresh melody in full idol aura, and wrote that those twenty seconds alone carry an air of their own. Lee wrote of the same song that its chorus opens out a melody that lodges in the ear, and Seukwip read its resolutions as sounding “somehow precarious”, with “a strange unease lurking” in wishes phrased as negatives.

Around it

Four months later the second single Songbird followed, and in September of the same year the first mini album Steady.