N.EX.T

The first title track Shin Hae-chul, once a solo star, released with a band. It renders the mechanical day of the city through mechanical, repeating notes.

• Rock guitar and drums sit atop a repeating pattern built from electronic sounds (a sequencer riff). It is the point where the computer-composition instincts honed on his second album, “Myself,” met a band sound.
• The vocal carries on drily, as if speaking, without loading on much emotion. It sounds layered over the blank face of a city dweller repeating a fixed routine.
• A steady, drum-machine-like pulse drives the whole song, and it was received as a new sound of around 1992, mixing techno and rock.
• Heard alongside the “Knight of the Doll” sequence that opens the first album, it shows that this album was built not as single tracks but as one continuous flow.

The most beloved song from the second album, released as the lineup wavered and the road to broadcasting was blocked. It recalls a small death of childhood in an adult's voice.

• Within an album full of heavy metal songs, it opens with a rare softness of grain. The calm introduction sets a mood of remembrance.
• Rather than bursting out in loud sorrow, Shin Hae-chul sings low, as if telling a story, then lifts the emotion in the chorus.
• As the song goes on, the band arrangement grows steadily thicker (a build-up), so the final passage resounds all the more.
• It is also the song N.EX.T's members played again at the 2015 Pentaport memorial stage. It is one of the songs sung most often at gatherings honoring Shin Hae-chul.

Title track of the sprawling third album, a mix of samulnori and social critique. It was the ballad with which a heavy album reached out to the public.

• It opens on keyboards and a gentle accompaniment, then follows the rock ballad (power ballad) form as the band gradually comes in.
• The vocal speaks in the manner of offering comfort to a lover. Soothing low at first, it opens the emotion in the chorus with long, soaring high notes.
• Thanks to the mixing of British engineer Mick Glossop, each instrument is heard distinctly separated. This is why the third album is judged the best-sounding of N.EX.T's records.
• Kim Se-hwang's guitar solo puts its weight less on fast technique than on carrying the melody along as if singing it.

A single released in the year the band was to disband. Its simple, upright vow to stay by someone's side became N.EX.T's most popular face.

• The accompaniment begins fairly spare, putting the vocal up front. The steady ensemble playing of the third lineup backs it up.
• The high notes bursting out in the chorus contrast with Shin Hae-chul's signature thick low-to-mid range, forming the song's peak.
• It sounds like a song that keeps a rock band's texture while being trimmed to a length and structure easy on the radio.
• In concert it became a song the audience sings along to, and it was never left out of the later memorial concerts either.

The overture-like song of a rock opera made for the animation “Spirit Cavalry Lazenca.” It holds the largest-scale imagination N.EX.T ever harbored.

• Following directly on the instrumental arrangement of Holst's “Mars,” the orchestral grandeur passes straight into a metal sound.
• The arrangement, with keyboards imitating an orchestra and heavy guitars layered over them, is the grammar of symphonic metal (orchestral heavy metal).
• Spoken in the voice of a heroic epic that calls out for salvation, its vocals stacked like a choir (chorus dubbing) swell the refrain to enormous size.
• It is still talked about as a rare case of a band devoting an entire album to a Korean-made animation in the late 1990s.

The title track of the Lazenca album and N.EX.T's last signature song before the breakup. It was the brightest, most powerful song left behind by a band that had already announced its dissolution.

• Kim Se-hwang's guitar riff opens the track, and this short, repeating guitar phrase serves as the hook of the entire song.
• A song framed as the sun speaking to a boy in the darkness, its vocal takes the voice of someone who encourages him and lifts him to his feet.
• Built to hold back its force in the verse and release it all at once in the chorus, it is made for crowds to shout along in concert.
• It premiered as an Mnet music video before its official release. It is a scene from an era when cable music channels were rising as a new outlet for promoting new songs.