Song Review:: N. Flying: Everlasting- Everlasting

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  • Release date: 2025 May 28
  • Album tracklist: Songbird (Korean Ver.), Everlasting, Rise Again, Love You Like That, Love In Memory, Still You, HAPPY ME!, Born To Be, Run Like This, Moebius, LOG, Stand By Me (Korean Ver.) 
  • Album runtime: 39 minutes

 I think this might be my first review for these guys, which is fun because I've got a few of their songs in my one beloved playlist because they just generally hit my brain right. 2015 debut and if you were looking to get into them, now would be the time as this is the first release with the entire group post-military. 

Strings are here! That's it. I'm sold. Amazing song. One of my top releases for the month. It's a little funny that I'm so easily pleased, but I really am a simple Fangirl at heart. Good news is we don't just have the strings. We've got my favorite triumvirate as well, with the piano, guitar, and drums, which is kind of requisite for a band. I really like how the intro and outro mimic each other with the stripped out instrumentals featuring just the solo piano. I mean, really, it's a great way to bookend the song and doesn't fall into the annoyance I have with songs that have a cool or otherwise interesting intro, but then the rest of the song is completely unrelated. It's like having a movie where the opening scene is a completely different genre, and there's no reason or explanation for it. At least this way, with it bookended like it is, it creates something more of a frame narrative, in which case having something tonally and thematically different works. 

The song has one brief belt, but there are clear varying dunamic levels, so I'm happier to accept that blink-and-you-miss-it belt than I would be otherwise. I'm feeling pretty spoiled by the runtime, which should be for obvious reasons, but without taking a look at the lyrics, it feels like there's a story being told. I'm about to go on a tangent. If you want to skip it, their voices are incredible and the song gives a great blend of falsetto, mixed, and chest voices. Highly recommend. Tangent incoming. There's absolutely nothing wrong with short stories. One of my favorite chapters in all of the literature I've read is the fish chapter from As I Lay Dying, which is literally a sentence. The trick with short stories in order for them to be good and masterful is that they must be heavily nuanced and layered, saying little but doing much as it were. When you get into longer forms, that's when you have the room to allow for only the single or double-entendres. A song that's the length of Everlasting has the space to do more, but with the pieces doing less, not that Everlasting doesn't do quite a bit if I'm hearing the variations correctly, as well as the occasional harmonization, which I'd like to be hearing more of, but this is a band, mot necessarily a singing group, so it's less of a frustration and more of a note.

This music video is somewhere in the realm of Slice of Life. There's really not too much of a storyline, but it feels more "acty" than a vibes and visuals music video. And maybe it's the country girl in me, but I'm inclined to give it a slice of life tag even though I doubt that they are regularly out in the country like that. I don't know. It's in that gray area. If you'd prefer to call it one over the other, I'll agree with you.

 

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