YOU MADE MY DAWN

The record

YOU MADE MY DAWN is SEVENTEEN’s sixth mini album, released on 21 January 2019 with six tracks. The title track is ‘Home’. The album introduction on Bugs presents it as a continuation of YOU MAKE MY DAY. Idology’s Mano wrote of the pair that “past the previous record, whose theme was ‘a summer’s day’ by the season it came out in, this time they have brought a mini album suited to ‘the dawn of deep winter’”.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in ‘1st Listen’, its round-up of new releases from late January 2019, as short pieces by two critics. Mimyo opened: “SEVENTEEN are the team making the most magical pop songs in K-pop right now.” He wrote of the songs that they are “very strange, arriving from places the imagination hardly reaches, like a magician’s trick, and at the same time packed watertight as pop songs”, and closed: “if you want to see the present of K-pop, you need to listen to SEVENTEEN’s music.”

Mano picked the handling of the unit songs as what had changed. He wrote that “this time too every song sounds as though it had been one thing from the start, so smoothly gathered up that you only realise they are unit songs on looking at the credits — which suggests we need not worry about the unit songs from here on”.

Among the tracks

Of the title track Mano wrote that “the construction is quite unusual”. He described how it “opens minimally with only bass and vocal, then at the point where a drop ought to come turns instead and returns to simple and minimal”, adding that “even the chorus, when the drop finally comes, feels calm for a drop, which is fresh in itself”. Mimyo wrote that the same song stirs together “an abrasive sound and a restless sense of beat” with “tender, sweet moments and hot exhilaration — everything a K-pop listener could want — then, by cutting in at an unexpected point, does not let go of one more pleasure, an aggressive energy”. The Korea Herald’s Kwon Yae-rim placed it third when she ranked SEVENTEEN’s thirty best songs in July 2020, calling it an “urban future R&B track” that is “soothing and full of warmth while being catchy”.

The B-side both critics chose is the hip-hop unit’s ‘Chilli’. Mano wrote that “the wordplay between ‘chilly’, meaning cold, and ‘chilli sauce’ is charming”, and Mimyo wrote that the song “is very disorderly, yet within a startling concentration it simply sweeps the listener along”. Mano recommended the performance unit’s ‘Shhh’ alongside it for “the sensuous, rolling moombahton rhythm”, and Mimyo wrote of the ballad ‘Hug’ that it “fills the necessary conditions of a ballad comfortably while hauling hard at the sufficient ones and expanding them”. Kwon placed ‘Getting Closer’ twenty-third on her list.

Numbers

The label ships English titles for the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘포옹’ is Hug, ‘칠리’ is Chilli and ‘숨이 차’ is Getting Closer.