Song Review:: TOMORROW X TOGETHER: 7TH YEAR: A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns- Stick With You

• Release date: 2026 April 13

• Album tracklist: Bed of Thorns, Stick With You, Take Me to Nirvana (feat.Vinida Weng), So What, 21st Century Romance, Dream of Mine

• Album runtime: 16 minutes

 Am I seeing this correctly? Has TOMORROW X TOGETHER released a song that's over three minutes? I mean, there are also three that are 2:3X and one that's under two-and-a-half minutes. And the title track is not one of the longer two. So. But I am all for them getting to have longer songs again. I'd love to see HYBE lift whatever nonsensical ban they have on title tracks longer than three minutes. Even TXT's older brothers didn't manage to escape it last month.

The first part of the song has very little variation to it, then we get a bit techno. And then it's back to business. I'm very much enjoying the fact that the song ends a cappella, thought I'm not sure if that's one of their voices with heavy post-production effects or autotune on it or if it's a synthesizer that's doing the melody as well so that it hides a little bit.  I will say though that the song does have quite a bit of texture going on, which is an improvement over some of their recent, more milquetoast releases. I'm glad they're moving away from that as well. 

No rapping in this one. There would have been room for it if the song had an extra fifteen seconds somewhere, which would put it in justifiable rounding up to three-minutes territory (I'm aware that it technically does, but that's giving the song too much extra time when half a minute is a fifth of the song). I wish they'd go back to the era of 0X=LOVESONG and LO$ER=LO♡ER and Chasing That Feeling. Their voices are so well-suited for that. And not that this is a bad sounding song, because they do sound very good, near-constant breathiness aside, but it's just fine. And when they've got songs in their line-up that are so distinctly TOMORROW X TOGETHER, a song that wastes their vocal textures like this is a disappointment. Yeonjun, for better or for worse, has one of those remarkably distinct voices that a producer could build a song around. And how many songwriters does this one have? According to Genius, that would be 23, and none of them are in the group. You'd think Hitman Bang would know the voices of a group at the company he founded and is still on-hand as executive producer for, but the uniqueness of the group is not here. I like the song. The "Is this a dream?" part is a fantastic addition and helps so much with the interrupting the status quo of the song. And they sound good. But 23 different songwriters turns the song into a pleasant amalgamation that could have been given to any group and doesn't play to the strengths of this group, other than the fact that they're all strong vocalists. I'm so disappointed. I see why it took them so long to record it.

This also disappointed me badly enough that I didn't even bother to wait until I was finished with this to listen to the album because I wanted something to dig my teeth into. I found it in the form of Bed of Thorns, 21st Century Romance, and Dream of Mine, though the latter two admittedly do feel like they're just getting started when they're ending (and also had two of the members involved somewhere). The artwork is quite pretty, by the way. 

The music video is almost twice the length of the song. You know what that means? A lot of storyline and I'm happy wiggling over that. I'm a tiny bit peeved that the dancing music isn't included in the song because you mean to tell me we could have gotten a dance break that is the exact opposite of an EDM dance break? I'm fine. I'm completely fine. It's fine.