Featuring the surprise returns of a certain baggy-jeaned rapper, NCT 127 recently made one of their most exciting returns yet with their 6th full album WALK. Fear not: the group’s leader’s absence for military service won’t stop the album from happening with all voices present. It seems like even if Taeyong was on the moon, they’d find a way to get his lines over the radio transmission. Or they’d just record in advance as they evidently did here. Still.
We checked the facts, now we’re cruisin’ to a summer beat – 127 style – with this comeback’s titular song, “Walk”. For one of the most recognisable lineups of voices in a boy group, it’s great to hear almost each one of the boys make their own catchy spin on the hook: “I’m a bit rusty, a bit dusty / I walk like I forgot how to / Don’t care ’bout a thing, I just walk how I feel like / Walking squeaky like I’m broken”.
It was a good call to get virtually every member trying out the chorus: these boys are simply too fun to listen to. Taeyong’s rich huskiness is a polar opposite to Jungwoo’s nasal timbre, and Haechan voice sounds like chocolate gained sentience and took up singing. If NCT 127 were confident before, that confidence flows in every beat now. The members who might’ve had just one or two gimmicky lines in the past have completely solidified their place – and not one of them is left out. Not only is this good for the fans who care deeply about line distributions, it works better musically, too. Everyone in the group brings something truly marvellous to the table.
Lower down the 11-track setlist, “Orange Seoul” joins the club as another cityscape-painting tune, alongside “City 127” and their more recent “Yacht”. Often the boys’ jazzier songs have a New Yorky feel, with no shortage of sax and passionate rapping – probably aided by Johnny’s American upbringing and thus accent (Mark, the Canadian, can pretend too). “Orange Seoul”, however, is about the beauty of their hometown in Korea as the sunset takes the stage for a beautiful, fleeting time. You don’t need to be an analyst to make the connection to their run as NCT 127 these past eight years.
NCT 127, when not hitting hard experimental beats, can be quite the smooth groove lords. “Pricey” features a pronounced guttural bassline that you can feel in your stomach; it latches onto you from inside-out, and once the jazzy piano walks in, there’s no escape. A well-written hook takes the stage on a quintessential NCT 127 B-side: “That kinda love is pricey”.
Other songs to fit that title include the instrument-light and vocally flawless “No Clue” and “Can’t Help Myself”. The latter song could easily be a sweet ending to the album; instead “Meaning of Love” takes that role: a cheerful acoustic clap-along kind of anthem you get at the end of a feel good flick. Its sound is like the maturer, more resolute sibling to their 2018 song “Welcome To My Playground”: all the playfulness, oodles more of the sentimentality.
That’s just how NCT 127 like to end things, like nothing’s ever truly ending. Ensuring an absent member still has their place on the record says it all.
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