화양연화 Young Forever (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever)

The record

화양연화 Young Forever is a special album BTS released on 2 May 2016, with twenty-three tracks. The title track is ‘Burning Up (FIRE)’, and the label ships the record in English as The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever. BIGHIT MUSIC’s album introduction on Bugs calls it the record that closes the long run of the sequence that went through 화양연화 pt.1 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 1) and 화양연화 pt.2 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 2), and says it holds the last of the story of a youth that keeps running forward through an anxious, precarious present. The record re-sequences the songs of those two, and adds three new ones and several remixes.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in its 1st Listen for early May 2016, as short pieces by three critics.

Kim Yun-ha wrote of the sequence as a whole that “the greatest thing BTS have taken from the two-part youth sequence is perhaps not the title of the act of the moment, nor the dazzling records of one kind or another, but how fluently they have taken various elements of pop into themselves”. She closed: “from ‘EPILOGUE : Young Forever’, the hymn to a youth they searched so long for, through to the remix work, where the balance between intention and result stands out — it will be hard to find a more fitting result than this for a while, either as the close of a glittering journey or as something to raise expectations for what comes next.”

Doldolmalling called it “the special album that closes the The Most Beautiful Moment in Life sequence”, and welcomed the inclusion of the prologue mix of ‘Butterfly’ she had mentioned in an earlier review. “What I like about BTS’s slow numbers,” she wrote, “is that they have a cinematic flavour”, and she called the record “an album that is good to give even to people who do not know BTS well”.

Jo Seong-min wrote that “it is good to see the energy you get from an artist who has a rhythm of their own”.

Among the tracks

‘Burning Up (FIRE)’ is the song with a music video here, and the official channel’s upload is dated 1 May 2016, the day before release. Of the two songs newly added, Jo Seong-min wrote that “‘Burning Up’ and ‘Save ME’, added to the existing sequence, not only hold on to the musical colour BTS have had all along — which is more than a tour release would do — but in some ways widen the territory a little further”. He read ‘Burning Up’ as “a work that widened the ground they can cover once more, with a plainer lyric and a fiercer performance”, and wrote that ‘Save ME’ keeps the main theme of the two earlier records while taking the place that brings the long story to a close.

Kim Yun-ha wrote of the same two that “the new songs ‘Save ME’ and ‘Burning Up (FIRE)’ divide that rough, precarious feeling of theirs between lyricism and wildness, and follow faithfully behind ‘I NEED U’ and ‘Dope’, the songs that carried the team up”. Doldolmalling turned to the remixes: “in the flow of the album as a whole the ‘I NEED U’ remix worked on by Shaun of The Koxx is the odd one out, and given that it was played first at a year-end awards show, I wonder whether it was an independent track prepared for that stage.”

Numbers

The label’s own distribution metadata prints the English title as The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever, dated 2 May 2016. The English song titles come from the same place: ‘불타오르네’ is Burning Up (FIRE), ‘EPILOGUE : Young Forever’ is Epilogue: Young Forever, ‘뱁새’ is Silver Spoon, ‘고엽’ is Autumn Leaves, ‘쩔어’ is Dope, ‘잡아줘’ is Hold Me Tight and ‘이사’ is Moving On.

What came after

The sequence about youth closes here, and five months later the second full-length album, Wings, arrives. That record returns four months after it as YOU NEVER WALK ALONE, with four songs added.