Jakarta, IO – South Korea boyband Seventeen set a new record, as the group with the highest-selling album in K-Pop history, through its 10th extended play album FML, released 24 April 2023. On its official webpage, Hanteo Chart reported that the band sold 4,550,214 copies of the album in its debut week (24-30 April 2023).
Separately, Yonhap news office noted that Seventeen’s latest album broke the previous sales record set by BTS. The latter’s Map of the Soul:7, released on February 2020, had a record sale of 3,378,600 copies in its debut week.
FML contains six songs, including “F*ck My Life”, “Fire”, “I Don’t Understand but I Luv U”, and “April Shower”. According to Antara, Seventeen member Joshua declared “F*ck My Life” is one of the two main songs that carry the overall positive message of the album. The other main song, “Super”, is a brilliant piece of music. It is believed to lend itself to spectacular stage action later. It was written jointly by Woozi, S.Coups and Vernon as an expression of the band’s desire to continue growing. They were inspired by Sonogon (Sun Wukong), the main character in the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West. The lyrics to “Super” in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, contain the name “Sonogon”.
Debuting in May 2015, Seventeen is one of the most popular K-Pop bands to date, with hits like “Very Nice” and “Pretty U”. The mega-boyband under Pledis Entertainment has 13 members, who are divided into sub-units, according to their individual skills and specialties: hip-hop unit, vocal unit, and performance unit. “Seventeen” is derived from the number of members, plus the number of the band’s sub-units, and “one”, to signify “team unity”.
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Other than for their charming voices, Seventeen is also known for their strong charisma and eye-catching performance, thanks to their complex yet perfectly synchronized choreography. They are also known as “self-producing idols” because of their active participation in the creation and development of each song and choreography in their albums. (yas)