Just weeks after concluding promotions for K-Pop Hot 100 Top 10 smash “Something,” K-pop royalty TVXQ! storms back on the scene with a follow-up single “Spellbound,” off its newly-released and repackaged “Tense” album.
TVXQ! Talks ‘Tense’ Album, 10 Years in K-Pop: Exclusive Video Interview
The groovy, soul-funk piece is an exciting display of TVXQ!’s ever-growing musical maturity and vocal skills. The twosome glides through the track with steamy, textured vocals over an elaborate production of shuffle rhythms, soft electric guitar strums and squalls of saxophones and trumpets.
“Spellbound” — which takes inspiration from Korean phrase “suri suri masuri,” the equivalent to “abracadabra” in English — is about an emotionally closed-off man who starts appreciating and finding significance even in the littlest things he shares with his new love, as though he’s been put under a magic spell.
The five-minute music video uses the one-shot method (seen in labelmate EXO’s “Growl” video) and showcases TVXQ! and its six female dancers’ charismatic performance that cleverly uses props, like cards, to reenact a magician’s moves.
Don’t Miss: Billboard’s Track-By-Track Review of TVXQ!’s ‘Tense’
For the highly-stylized choreography, TVXQ! recruited internationally renowned dance team Nappy Tabs, with whom the group has previously worked for their 2012 single, “Humanoids.”
The repackaged “Tense” album consists 12 tracks, plus three new tracks: “Spellbound” and solo tracks by Yunho and Changmin, “November With Love” and “Heaven’s Day,” respectively. TVXQ! will begin bringing its slick moves to the live stage when promotions kick off at K-pop chart show “Music Bank” on Feb. 28.