NCT 127 BLINGY — Down to Five Members, and It Still Sounds Like a Full Group
NCT 127 has lost more of itself in the past two years than most K-pop acts survive. Taeil was cut from the group in 2024 following a sexual assault case. Mark Lee's contract expired in April. Doyoung and Jungwoo are serving mandatory military duty and sat out this comeback entirely. That leaves five people - Johnny, Taeyong, Yuta, Jaehyun and Haechan - to carry a 10th-anniversary album for a group that debuted with nine. "BLINGY" mostly manages it, and the moments where it doesn't are exactly the moments built to matter most.
The title track, a Benjmn-produced collision of dubstep and distortion synths, opens the record at full volume: hard-hitting drums, glitchy synth stabs, a chanted hook built for arena call-and-response. It's a smart choice for a comeback single from a reduced lineup - dense production and a crowd-chant chorus don't ask any individual voice to carry the song, and NCT 127 has never needed a soloist to sound big. "Piñata," previewed five days early on "America's Got Talent," pushes further into rock territory, all electric-guitar snarl and breakbeat drums, and it's the album's most convincing argument that five members can still sound like a full group under enough distortion.
The record runs into trouble exactly where a 10th-anniversary album is supposed to be strongest: its sentimental centerpiece. "127 Million Miles" is the one track built to acknowledge the absence directly - all seven members, including Doyoung and Jungwoo, appear on it, the group's full lineup assembled on record if not on stage. It should be the album's emotional peak. Instead it's the safest production on the tracklist, a piano-led pop-rock number that plays it so straight it drains the tension the song's own premise depends on. The instinct to reunite all seven voices for the anniversary is right. The arrangement built around that reunion isn't ambitious enough to earn it.
Elsewhere, "BLINGY" is more interesting when it stops trying to be sentimental. "Getaway," built on tropical-house guitar and warm harmonies, is the loosest thing here and one of the best - a genuine change of register for a group whose past records leaned harder into R&B and muscular hip-hop. "Day After Day" opens like a ballad before flipping into hyper-trap double-time drums on the chorus, a structural trick that shouldn't work as well as it does. "Legacy" and "Step Up" fill out the record's hip-hop core competently without adding much the title track hasn't already covered.
What the album gets right, more than any individual track, is casting. Yuta and Johnny - both historically positioned behind NCT 127's designated main vocalists - get real space here, and they use it. With Doyoung's vocal power and Taeil's presence both unavailable, the record could easily have sounded like a band working with its hands tied. It doesn't, largely because the five remaining members split the load instead of trying to replace what's missing.
Jaehyun told reporters at Monday's press conference in Seoul that chart numbers weren't the point of this release - "better outcomes would be great, of course," he said, before pivoting to what the anniversary meant to the group. That's a reasonable thing for an artist to say about a milestone record. It's also, on the evidence of "127 Million Miles," a little bit of an admission: the song written to carry the weight of the occasion is the one moment "BLINGY" plays it safe.
"BLINGY" is out now via SM Entertainment. NCT 127's fifth world tour, "Neo City - The Redline," opens Sept. 18 at Seoul's KSPO Dome.
