SF9's 'Without Wings' and TENACITY Mark 10 Years, Minus Two Members
SF9 marked its 10th anniversary on Wednesday with TENACITY, only the second full-length album the group has released since debuting with "Feeling Sensation" in October 2016. Everything about the rollout says milestone: a press showcase at Cube Convention Center in Seoul, a promise from the members to keep going for "60 more years," and two anniversary concerts booked for October at KBS Arena. What the album can't get around is that two of SF9's eight members, Zuho and Yoo Tae-yang, are sitting this one out for mandatory military service, and their absence shapes how the record has to be read.
TENACITY runs 10 tracks and just 27 minutes, closer in length to one of the group's earlier EPs than to a full studio statement. The title track "Without Wings" carries the bulk of the promotional weight, backed by a teaser, a full music video and a separate trailer film, and it's built around the same idea driving the album's concept: that the group's limits over the past decade were self-imposed rather than external, and that recognizing that is what lets them "fly" again despite the current lineup gap. It's a clean thesis for an anniversary record, and "Without Wings" states it directly enough that the rest of the tracklist reads as commentary on it, from the confrontational "PRESSURE" to the wry mismatch of "Best Mistake."
Where the album runs into trouble is ownership. Of the ten tracks, only three carry a credited SF9 member as a writer - Chani, Hwiyoung and Youngbin - with the rest of TENACITY built by an outside team that includes Swedish and American songwriters alongside FNC's in-house pool. For a group that has spent a decade building an identity around its own creative input, particularly through Chani and Hwiyoung's writing credits on past releases, an anniversary album this reliant on outside pens undercuts the "look how far we've come on our own terms" framing the press materials lean on.
The tracklist itself doesn't help make the case for depth. Titles like "REAL FROM THE FAKE" and "Do You Want Me," positioned deep in the back half, read as generic placeholders next to the specificity of "Without Wings" or "Curtain Call," the tracks doing the most work to justify the album's stated concept. "Curtain Call" earns its spot as the closest thing to a genuine counterpart to the title track - its title alone plays directly against "Without Wings," staging the record as a set of bookends between an ending and a second flight, which is a sharper piece of sequencing than most of what surrounds it. "Do You Want Me" closes the album on its most anonymous title, the kind of song title that could belong to any mid-tier K-pop release from the last five years, and it's a flat way to end a record built around a specific, personal anniversary narrative.
TENACITY isn't a bad record for a group at year 10. The concept holds together, "Without Wings" earns its spot at the front, and six members without their full lineup is a genuinely difficult position to make a coherent album from at all. But a 27-minute tracklist mostly written by people outside the group, capped by a title that says nothing, is a thinner victory lap than a 10th anniversary should get.
TENACITY is out now on FNC Entertainment. SF9 holds two 10th-anniversary concerts at KBS Arena in Seoul on October 10 and 11.
