Brown Eyed Girls goes back to the basics

“Basic” is girl group Brown Eyed Girls’ sixth studio-length album, and their first in nearly two and a half years. Bringing all the members together at Mystic Entertainment’s label Apop and coming right on time for the group’s 10th anniversary, the album was carefully crafted in order to express what the members felt were at their “basic core.”

“The album started with the question, ‘What is BEG’s basic?’” said rapper Miryo at a press showcase held at the Hyundai Card Understage in Seoul on Wednesday.

“What were we like when we started? When we look back, we began with our vocals as our strength. Then our performances allowed us to gain the love of the public. That’s our core,” she said, saying that the album was filled with tracks that would showcase those two basic strengths.

Although the Brown Eyed Girls was first introduced as a ballad vocal group in 2006, they rose to A-list status after their performance-heavy hit ”Abracadabra“ in 2009.

At the showcase, the press heard a medley of songs from the album, which were mostly upbeat dance songs layered with jazzy vocals.

Those thoughts were extrapolated into ideas about the basic essence of the whole world. Many of the tracks on “Basic” are named after scientific terms that try to explain the universe we live in, such as “Warm Hole” (a play on the word wormhole) “God Particle,” “Atomic,” and “Fractal.”

The lead track is “Brave New World,” a futuristic dance song that has many unexpected twists in its structure and melody, with lyrics that invite the listener to explore a fantastic new world.

“When we revealed our track list, a lot of people were really surprised because they weren’t titles you’d typically expect from a girl group,” said JeA. “But we weren’t trying to make it difficult.”

Ga-in agreed. “It’s a pop album, and we didn’t want it to be too complicated or deep,” she said. “So we interpreted those scientific terms using the frame of love, and tried to make the lyrics easier and more interesting.”

According to the members, “Warm Hole” is a good representation of that effort. The songs take the idea of a wormhole, which is a passage that connects two points in space and time, and used it to describe the process of moving to the next stage in a relationship. The play on words is intended to express the warm feeling of being in love.

Ga-in noted that the album would particularly appeal to BEG’s fan base, because the musical style harks back to the group’s early albums.

“‘God Particle’ is very funky,” she said. “It sounded like the genre we used to do in our first two albums. I think our fans would like it,” she said. 

Brown Eyed Girls’ sixth studio-length album “Basic” drops at midnight Thursday.

By Won Ho-jung (hjwon@heraldcorp.com)