Song Review:: NCT JNJM (NCT): BOTH SIDES- BOTH SIDES

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  • Release date: 2026 February 23
  • Album tracklist: BOTH SIDES, I.D.O.L, What It Is, HASHTAG, WIND UP, sexier
  • Album runtime: 16 minutes

 Well, another NCT subunit has debuted. This one is a duo like DoJaeJung was a trio, but comprises of Jeno and Jaemin, both of whom are members of NCT Dream and NCT U already (and have a lot of personal history between the two of them). Even though the NCT Dream members are generally quite young, I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't need to double check their ages because Dream debuted almost ten years ago, even if the current lineup was set years later. I will say that, even though they don't have a single song actually at three minutes and two songs that don't even average out to two-and-a-half minutes, the title track is the longest song on the mini album and it's within an acceptable distance shy of three minutes.

Well, as we know, I'm not overly fond of hip-hop, but I will attempt to be fair about this. The use and application of the beat feels fairly well done because while it is very much in a supporting role, it drops out occasionally to allow the rapping to be fully center stage in the spotlight, as it should since this is not an instrumental on its own. It's also nicely rhythm disrupting because that loss of sound immediately brings attention back to the song if you happen to have wandered off mentally. 

Again, I'm not even going to pretend to be an authority on rapping here, so I'm just going to comment on what I hear. We've got a decent contrast between higher and lower voices here, and texturally, we don't have a lot of sameness to the rapping styles either. We don't have a lot of the very heavy rapping, but we also don't spend the entire time vocally skimming, which I do appreciate. My ears are not tuned enough to rap to be able to say whether or not this is good rapping, if this is a strong differentiation to make a strong debut, or if this is a poor showing. But there are no problems that readily jump out at me.

They're dorks. That's all I have to say about this. This music video is wonderfully fun. Also, I wish my life didn't revolve around needing subtitles because this song is kind of slutty in the lyrics, and that way I would have had warning before I teared up from the effort of restraining my laughter because I was in public the first time I watched this. It's giving strong "I'm good in all positions" vibes. Also, it's them spending the entire time talking about how attractive they are, which I'm not going to argue against because I try not to lie.

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