…and how do we feel about ballads?
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[5.00]
Micha Cavaseno: The age old saga of an artist mistaking softness and acoustics for value in the wake of their pop career. The arrangement’s fine, but if this were anyone but IU, I’d wonder how this got as far as it did. Even then I have to wonder how so boring and generic a song got indicated as a good idea for a single.
[2]
Will Adams: It’s hard to fault “Through the Night” when its delicate acoustics are executed so well (thanks mostly to IU’s up-close singing). I’m just wondering if we’re ever gonna get another “Sogyeokdong.”
[5]
Ryo Miyauchi: The video helps explain why IU’s singing so soft and why she’s dancing around her words. Her bashfulness gives way to a tender ballad that wraps up her new album nicely. But charming as she makes it, her love letter unravels a little too slow as a first impression for her comeback.
[5]
Madeleine Lee: “Through the Night” falls into the genre of ballad that’s comforting to listen to for its predictability. IU’s delicate singing is always a treat, and it’s the only thing that makes this song stand out; when it’s placed as the second of four consecutive quiet, slow songs on her album’s tracklist, it fades into the background.
[5]
Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: IU does acoustic, folkish ballads better than almost everyone in K-Pop, but this is far from a back-to-basics approach. There is a deep sense of growth in the cohesion of this track, from the playing of those guitar chord progressions to the sound mixing, and IU’s sweet tone carries the song exquisitely, even when it feels more restrained than usual in this setting. Perhaps “Through the Night” is a bit too long for its own good, but what an effective slow burner it is.
[7]
Mark Sinker: Whether you’re 15 or 38 or 85, the magnificent, goofy thing about falling in love — or just feeling in love — is that it does two things at once: first is bring you down to the exact same foolish frightened animal level as all the rest of the world; second is (paradoxically) convince you it’s an affair the like of which never was or again will be. IU has been too professionally busy since forever probably to have been the tongue-tied smitten shy newbie outsider the way you or I once were, and only able to converse to her diary about it in burning clichés — but she’s been working, all that same time, as a consummate craftsperson dealing in the source of many of them. This is a song literally made of nothing you haven’t heard elsewhere: her held-in strength as a performer, her precise iron-clad reserve, brings something to it that’s interesting and true, really a kind of fragile anonymity.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: IU is a careful balladeer, and “Through the Night” is characteristically delicate. It is all the more lovely for it. There is no tension in its dappled calm — to my anglophone ears it sounds like spring sun with no hint of twilight — and its art is in the slow-motion glimmers it arranges against a light of brilliant nothing.
[5]