Another review in the same day? Who am I?

The second debut of last week that I want to cover today is GHOST9’s. The group hails from MAROO Entertainment, which is also the home to Park Ji Hoon. GHOST9 contains nine members (Junhyung, Dongjun, Shin, Kangsung, Junseong, Prince, Woojin, Taesung and Jinwoo), with the latter three also part of the TEEN TEEN project group lineup that made their debut last year with It’s On You. Other members of the group come from MIXNINE and Produce X 101 backgrounds as well. The group made their debut last Thursday with Think of Dawn as the title track.

When I checked out Think of Dawn last week, I didn’t think much of it. And unfortunately, it seems like that statement still stands true a week after it was released. It takes on the noisy side form EDM, with some of the instrumental becoming slightly overwhelming when the focus should have purely been on the member’s vocals and rapping. There are a few examples of noisy EDM that I liked this year and I felt that I would have enjoyed Think of Dawn if the producers mixed the song a bit better, so that the members would have been more of the focus rather than the instrumental. But aside from that, it features a strong instrumentation that is extremely powerful to see on stage (more on that later). And their vocals and rapping were of a good standard. I did like how smooth the falsetto vocals in the pre-chorus and chorus felt, contrasting nicely with the intense and almost-erratic nature of the EDM instrumentation. I feel that the song could have been enhanced with some individual flair. To me, Think of Dawn could have been released by a number of other male groups active this year. It was pretty much a ‘heard before’ sound throughout majority of the track. The instrumental dance breakdown was a pleasant surprise. I liked the inclusion of it and its overall intensity, but this would have been a great opportunity to have gone down a unique route. Overall, a decent debut track.

It seemed like the music video didn’t have much to it other than that choreography and closeup formula (I really need to decide which order the two C’s should be in and stick with it). However, at the very end, we see one of the members flip a switch, revealing the massive cyclops robot that follows the members at the very of the music video. The presence of this robot raises questions, some of which are answered in the prequel video ‘Cinematic World‘. However, how did the members get stuck in the set of this music video? And what did the ending of the prequel video mean? I guess we will find out in their next music video/comeback. Story aside, I find such a robot to be very eerie (how fitting for the month of October) and the suspense at the end really sets the bar for the next comeback. I wished they included some of that suspense throughout the earlier parts of the MV. That would have made the video a little more captivating to watch.

As mentioned earlier, the song enables the performance to be very powerful. And that is exactly what we get. I quite like that. But they could have gone for something a little more impressive at the start. It looked cool but compared to other stunts that we have seen this year, it falls short. The performance climaxes during the instrumental dance break, which looked awesome.

Song – 7/10
Music Video – 8/10
Performance – 8/10
Overall Rating – 7.5/10