SEVENTEEN Paint a Picture of Love With “Your Choice” Mini Album
SEVENTEEN is back with another summer comeback.
On June 18, the 13-member group released their eighth mini-album Your Choice, their first comeback in eight months. It follows the release of their special album ; [Semicolon] in October 2020 and their seventh mini-album Heng:garae last summer. The expectations are high, but SEVENTEEN is ready.
Your Choice is part of “Power of ‘Love,’” a bigger project the group launched for 2021, with which they aim to depict the multifaceted nature of love — objectively, no easy task to communicate. “Love is at the center of our many actions and emotions,” Joshua recounted during a press conference held to coincide with Your Choice’s release on June 18. “Whether it is self-love, love for your friends, love for your family, or even love for your pets… love is at the center of it all. Through Your Choice and the "Power of 'Love'" project we just want to show these many diverse forms in our very own unique way. Through this project, we want to make music that many people can relate to, and show a new side of SEVENTEEN that no one has ever seen before.”
Leading Your Choice is the title track “Ready to Love,” described by DK as an “energetic” R&B-infused pop song, and its pastel-colored music video. With a thumping base and high-power choreography, the song is very different sonically from SEVENTEEN’s more recent title tracks, but it’s also an advancement thematically.
“Power of ‘Love’” kicked off with Wonwoo and Mingyu’s duo “Bittersweet,” featuring LeeHi, which pondered the shifting dynamics of love and friendship. Now, “Ready to Love” builds upon the same theme and stands as SEVENTEEN’s “mature” take on the classic love confession. "Wonwoo and Mingyu's 'Bittersweet' opened the chapter to this project. First of all, out of all the different forms of love, we explored love and friendship first,” the group revealed during their Out Now comeback special. “To go into more detail about this album, the title of the album means your choice is more important than my choice. So we wanted to show this sweet and mature side of SEVENTEEN and be honest about it.” (The friends and lovers conundrum is explicitly represented via telephone booths in the music video.)
The song is also a first for SEVENTEEN in the sense that its credits are the most extensive probably in the group's entire repertoire. Like most SEVENTEEN songs, the track is mainly penned and produced by Woozi and BUMZU, but it also features composing credits from HYBE CEO Bang Si-Hyuk (aka “hitman” Bang). “Now that we have become HYBE artists we've been given the environment to work in new ways and we've also gotten the opportunity to work with producer Bang Si-Hyuk,” Woozi recounted during the press conference. “He's, of course, the chairman of the company that I'm a part of but he's also a great composer and I could feel that he [respected] me and really [treated] me like an artist, which made me feel very honored.”
Aside from “Ready to Love,” Your Choice includes two other OT13 songs as b-sides: “Heaven’s Cloud” and “Anyone.” The former one is the project’s opener, a catchy pop ballad with a moderate tempo that sings of idealized love. With unapologetic love as the main theme, “Anyone” is one of the album’s clear standouts. The song’s darker feel and infectiously snappy melody also make for the perfect SEVENTEEN-style performance.
Your Choice also sees SEVENTEEN go back to their set units and their uniquely distinct sounds in the second half of the album. (; [Semicolon] featured age-based units with the aim of displaying the group’s versatility in a never-before-seen manner.) The group’s hip-hop unit (S.Coups, Wonwoo, Mingyu, and Vernon) kick off the unit portion with “GAM3 BO1,” an unconventional hyper-pop number with glitchy trap beats and internet references galore. (Akin to You Made My Dawn’s “Chilli,” Vernon’s trademark composer touch takes center stage.)
The performance unit members (namely Hoshi, Jun, The8, and Dino) follow suit with “Wave,” the project’s funkier offering with disco bass lines and murmured honey vocals. (At the risk of sounding trite, “Wave” is simply wavy – sonically and lyrically.) The vocal unit (Woozi, Jeonghan, Joshua, DK, and Seungkwan) round off the mini-album with “Same Dream, Same Mind, Same Night (같은 꿈, 같은 맘, 같은 밤)." With an undeniable ‘90s feel, the track is the quintessential love ballad in the project, and the group’s vocals are as exquisite as usual.
In all, Your Choice is intended as a comfort album, going back to one of the most explored yet expansive concepts in the annals of pop culture. Love as a topic could be daunting or hackneyed in less deft hands — instead, SVT take a classic theme and refresh it, which is appreciated in these trying times. Though maybe not as explicitly, the whole comeback also feels like a love letter to fans, with the inclusion of warm and comforting imagery as well as subtle callbacks to previous eras. (The cover art for Your Choice’s three different versions resembles that of the group's debut EP, 17 CARAT, which was released in 2015.)
“What I felt during producing the album is that we've shown you a lot of addictive music and intense performances before. With this new album, you'll get to see a new side of us,” Seungkwan said during the press conference. “We have given it so much thought and experimented a lot with new ideas so I hope that CARAT can get to feel that. I hope you will feel [comforted] while you're listening to it.”
Already ringing in this era as newly-minted quadruple million sellers, 2021 will undoubtedly be a busy year for the 13 members of SEVENTEEN. With Your Choice, they’ve begun to paint the canvas, but the bigger picture that will be “Power of ‘Love’” is far from finished – and we will be patiently waiting.
Listen to Your Choice below:
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue