I spent the start of the week revisiting tracks that I have yet to write reviews for. And this should continue into the rest of the weekend (with some album reviews). But I take a moment to review a new release from NCT 127. The group has returned with Kick It, 9 months after the release of Superhuman last year. Since their May 2019 comeback, the group went on to promote Superhuman, along with other tracks, in the US and achieved a worldwide reach. And we will probably see the same thing for NCT 127 in the near future. Kick It features on Neo Zone, the group’s second studio album. It also marks the return of Jungwoo, who sat out of NCT 127 promotions since August of last year for health reasons.

In my personal opinion, NCT 127 manages to Kick It up a notch with their new track. Pun was purely intended. There are two sides of the track. The first is the very shouting-heavy and noisy hook of the track. Part of me finds it pretty good and sees potential in it to become an addictive section of the part. And while I do enjoy the Bruce Lee homage and the ‘new thang‘ to be suitable for this hip-hop direction, the other part of me finds it annoying and ‘too loud’. It honestly could go either way depending on my mood when I am listening to the track. Thank god that the song has some relief moments, where the vocals are brought in. Part of them is glad for this, as a full 4 minutes of the shouting and noisy chorus would have been a little too much. At the same time, however, it causes a great mismatch in sound and (obviously) cuts whatever flow the song potentially had. At this stage however, I am looking more positively at the track and think it is pretty decent. It does remind me of some of their earlier works, which I didn’t enjoy at the time of review (but they have grown on me considerably). Going I had expected a little less shouting and something more refined, but this was pretty good as it is.

There is no doubt the music video is paying homage to Bruce Lee. For those who may not know who Bruce Lee is, he is actor who was very well known for the martial arts movies he starred in. The music video featured a fair amount of martial arts and the infamous yellow and black combo. Bruce Lee is well known for his yellow and black jumpsuit, an image of Bruce Lee that everyone probably knows of. The music video also has this Asian concept, which I thought was very cool. They managed to give it a modern twist and the members stand out accordingly.

Don’t think there is a live performance for this comeback yet. So we haven’t really seen all of it. From what I can see in the music video, the performance plays on textures to match the more melodic vocal moments and the intense hip-hop moments. I wouldn’t be surprise if it did feature some martial arts in it. The dance break already looks amazing and very powerful.

Song – 8/10
Music Video – 10/10
Performance – 9/10
Overall Rating – 8.8/10