Love always comes to be, whether we intend it to or not. Love was even outside the control of Eros, the god in charge of it. So much so that, when he went to find Psyche to carry out an order from Aphrodite, Eros’ mother and the goddess of beauty, he took one look at Psyche and decided to disobey the order. We can’t know exactly what Eros felt the moment he first fell in love, but we can assume one thing: that even for the god of love, it had the power to cause total confusion and topple the old order. A fervor to turn the body quietly hot, a force to lock the eyes into a stare, to whip the heart into orbit—once you know love’s involved, even something so illogical as Eros being wounded by his own arrow makes perfect sense. Love’s logic is always illogical.
Uncertainty surrounding love is a topic rarely tackled in NCT WISH songs. Her heart’s one big question mark, but no worries, because there’s no way love isn’t going to work out. Eros would’ve felt the same. He probably never worried that Psyche might not love him back. Shoot an arrow, and they fall in love—it was a certainty, patently obvious to him. After all, those were the mechanics of the very kind of fate he governed. NCT WISH’s approach to love is no different. You will love me, no question. Because that’s my decision to make. Because that’s what the destiny I’ve chosen looks like. The only thing left to puzzle over is how to keep my chosen destiny and that love going.
On their fourth mini album, “I SPY,” NCT WISH shows how they make love a reality. They can’t control when that special someone will fall in love, but they know the person they love will reciprocate their feelings. To see that love through, they specifically build a world in which they’ll be in love, and then invite that other person in. Whether or not falling in love requires Eros’ arrow, you certainly do require the other person to respond in order for the love to last. And that’s the irony: believing you can bring love about through sheer willpower alone while knowing that seeing it through will require that other person’s commitment, too. Within the illogical logic that defines love, “I SPY” becomes the place where Eros’ power to spark love meets Anteros’ desire that love be reciprocal.
A beautiful geometric world of love
Eros shared his love with Psyche in a palace far removed from reality. NCT WISH’s palace is a digital world, and the building blocks are the music. The group’s first studio album, “Ode to Love,” came out in April and expanded their musical horizons. Songs of every color rang out across the world of their music. The garage-infused title track and the bright pop song “Don’t Say You Love Me” give off a radiant glow, while the jazz hip hop of “Street (2AM)” and the bossa nova/hip hop blend of “Sticky” are as intense as they are otherworldly. By contrast, “Crush” and “Voyage” emphasize lush piano melodies that leave everything awash in a wistful haze.
But the six songs that make up “I SPY” share a single mood, one that’s artificial and cybernetic. All manner of different sounds are layered on, but there’s a consistently electronic core. From start to finish, the lead single, “I SPY,” dazzles with the landscape of a strange world built on that electronic sound. The song opens as if it’s pulling you into the digital world, then barrels through on playful synths and closes with an outro that shifts into something even more dynamic.
The electric guitar on “We Own This Street” struts its stuff over electronic tones as spacious as a street. The game world of “UPGRADE” is depicted through the kaleidoscopic waveforms of electronic sounds. “Super Major” sends its electronic music bouncing in every direction, and “Hubble Time” suggests the small cosmos inside a game, too. Across all of it, NCT WISH builds a world of their own, brick by digital brick. By the album’s closer, “Like A Dream,” the mood has noticeably shifted, but the feel established in the earlier tracks carries forward. Sampling the Carpenters classic “Close to You,” the song recreates the original’s lushness with dreamy synths and glides along like a waltz with the one you love.
It’s a world of sound that assembles itself in geometric shapes, dazzles as it moves along, then settles into a soft flicker. Never locked into any one form, these sounds transform freely and make up the world of love NCT WISH dreams of. It’s a digital world where some choice of input produces some output, and destiny can be shaped however you like. There could be no more perfect world for a Cupid who rules on the principle that shooting his arrow ensures love will come to be.
What love has done
The greatest paradox of the Eros approach to love is that you can decide to fall in love but not whether it lasts. Even if you construct a virtual world that yields the results you want, keeping love alive inside it takes two—that is, reciprocity. And that’s exactly where a key difference emerges between Eros’ palace and the digital world NCT WISH has built. Eros concealed his identity when he loved Psyche, but NCT WISH shows off the world they’ve built and eagerly invites the one they love inside.
The reason for the invitation is simple: Their world isn’t yet complete. They know a world of love can never be completed alone. On “I SPY,” NCT WISH invites someone into “my world” and then asks a series of questions: “What are you into these days? / What’s running through your mind? / Are you wide awake tonight too?” They’re waiting on the answers because the love isn’t complete until they hear them. Even if two people knew each other from a single glance, keeping that love going takes the reciprocity that Anteros’ kind of love stands for.
The interesting thing is that love has no one form set in stone. Rather than fixing on one exact point and building a rigid world, they create a fluid current. When two people meet, it may be that dimensions warp, things rush out of control, and errors pop up, but all of it becomes an “UPGRADE” to the old version of you, and the interplay between the two can swell to a cosmic scale (“Hubble Time”). Love, in other words, isn’t letting someone into a perfectly designed world. It’s having that someone turn order there upside down. The existing world evolves and renews itself by the very nature of each of them being there. Love sparked by Eros’ arrow ends up being completed like a waltz where two people match each other’s rhythm—toward each other, for each other, fitted to each other. It means dreaming the same dream, growing to resemble one another, and sometimes moving along as the other leads (“Like A Dream”).
In the end, love always hands you something that you couldn’t have ever realized alone. Gaining the minor superpower of spotting someone with eagle eyes, turning every question mark into an exclamation point and shooting it at them like an arrow, pushing beyond the limit and growing your world, matching your step with someone else’s—love makes all that happen. It’s never doubting that other person will love you at the same time that you need their hand to keep that love going. It’s shaping your own destiny through sheer will and yet gladly allowing it to change for someone else. In a digital world where it once seemed destined that input and output would line up perfectly, someone you love is a kind of glitch. And NCT WISH gladly accepts that illogical aspect of love, singing songs about love no one can finish alone.