**CORTIS — *GREENGREEN* reviewed**

2.31m copies. That is the first-week sales figure for *GREENGREEN*, CORTIS's second mini-album — more than five times the 430,000 copies shifted by their debut record. Add a Billboard 200 peak of number three, a clean sweep of South Korea's music broadcast rankings, and a number-one on Melon's daily chart, and by any commercial measure this album is a triumph. But what about the music?

*GREENGREEN* is the most direct statement yet of what CORTIS are trying to be. GREEN represents the direction the group wants to travel; RED marks the territory they wish to avoid. All six tracks sit somewhere between those two poles. The conceptual intent is clear enough. The question is how well that intent translates into sound.

The strongest moment is the lead single "REDRED". A raw synthesiser riff locked to an addictive rhythm makes for a genuinely fresh combination, and the X-shaped hand gesture in the choreography, paired with a hook that lodges itself in the brain, is shrewdly engineered for the short-form video era. In a single track, you understand exactly what CORTIS are after. "TNT" also impresses. Its lyric — roughly rendered as "five reckless kids in our rooms every night" — is honest and specific. The group tells its own story without embellishment.

The album's consistency across all six tracks, however, is where things fall short. "ACAI", built around the image of an açaí bowl, has a playful enough premise, but the songwriting does not match the concept. The rough-edged quality of the food-as-metaphor lyrics may well be deliberate, yet there is a difference between rawness and incompletion, and this track fails to observe it. "YOUNGCREATORCREW" is meaningful as a direct statement of the group's identity, but the message overwhelms the music. When a manifesto overpowers the melody, the song loses.

"Blue Lips" is the outlier. It explores the irony of how one's deepest investments can become one's deepest wounds — a quieter, more shadowed register than anything else here. Where the other tracks swagger, this one broods. That shadow, paradoxically, points most clearly towards where CORTIS should go next. "Wassup" is competent but forgettable; being inoffensive is not a flaw, but it is not enough to make a track memorable either.

In the end, *GREENGREEN* is the album that best showcases CORTIS's boldness — and most plainly exposes its limits. It is genuinely impressive that every member has a writing credit and that the record was made at a song camp in Los Angeles. But asking a group of twenty-year-olds, eight months into their career, to sustain that level of creative control evenly across six tracks is perhaps asking too much of talent that is still developing.

Sincerity and polish are not the same thing. Whether an album purchased by 2.31m fans has proven its worth to those 2.31m fans in purely musical terms is an entirely separate question. Audacity alone does not make everything possible — which is precisely why the next album matters more.

★★⯨☆☆ (2.5/5.0)

In a line: "The numbers were perfect. The music was about half that."