K-pop boy band TOMORROW X TOGETHER revealed the tracklist for their upcoming fourth studio album on Tuesday morning (July 1). The eight-track The Star Chapter: TOGETHER is due out on July 21 and will feature lead single “Beautiful Strangers,” as well as the songs “Upside Down Kiss,” “Ghost Girl,” “Sunday Driver,” “Dance With You” and “Take My Half.”
The news about the follow-up to 2023’s full-length The Name Chapter: FREEFALL was accompanied by a three-minute album preview featuring a series of evocative, blurry images underneath a English-language voice-over in which one of the members says, “I came back to life when you called my name. So now, I’ll call your name too.” The screen then explodes in animated fireworks as the strains of the mid-tempo ballad “Ghost Girl” bubbles up, melding into the yearning “Take My Half” and the bouncy, uptempo “Sunday Driver.” The clip also previews the hip-hop-inspired “Dance With You” and “Upside Down Kiss,” the dreamy “Song of the Stars” and emotional “Beautiful Strangers.”
Over the weekend, the group also dropped a three-and-a-half minute movie preview-like concept trailer that opens with news of a meteor shower playing on a cracked cellphone crammed into a birthday cake running footage of ominous mask wearing “surveillance units” on the hunt for restricted “gatherings beyond system jurisdiction.”
The scene then turns to birthday hat-wearing members SOOBIN, YEONJUN, BEOMGYU, TAEHYUN, and HUENINGKAI arguing at a party as the room is raided by the troops, with each man having a visceral, physical reaction to the assault that has them growing elf ears, horns wings, garlands and sporting different colored eyes. They alternately rush to help each other and tussle in the chaos to escape as the gentle ballad “Song of the Stars” plays underneath and they swap into all-white ensembles to come to the aid of Soobin, who is caught floating in mid-air. The video ends with the message: “Let’s move on to Tomorrow Together.”
The album that will also feature the song “Bird of Night” concludes the Star Chapter series and, according to a release, “explores the true meaning of ‘togetherness,’” with each song representing a different facet of the singers’ journey together. The trap beat-driven “Beautiful Strangers” tells an unconventional love story — focused on “how ‘I’ grow stronger and more empowered through being with ‘you’”— via beats created by producer “hitman” bang, as well as K-pop hitmaker Slow Rabbit.
The quintet’s members were also deeply involved in the creative process, with YEONJUN helping to write lyrics for “Upside Down Kiss” and “Ghost Girl,” BEOMGYU adding production on “Take My Half” and TAEHYUN working on the lyrics and composition of “Bird of Night.”
TXT will kick off a worldwide headlining tour, ACT : TOMORROW, at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul on Aug. 22-23.
Watch the Star Chapter: TOGETHER concept trailer below.