The music video for Spark’s prerelease track from their second full-length album, “Dreamer,” began with Lee Cheonghyeon staring down at a career aspiration form while slumped over a desk.
The blank spaces he couldn’t fill in reflected in his golden irises.
Beyond the classroom windows were students out on the field, classmates studying diligently at their desks, yet among them all, Lee Cheonghyeon failed to hide his troubled expression.
“I don’t understand.”
The walk home after shoving the unfinished career form into his bag felt endlessly long.
Lee Cheonghyeon walked with his school backpack slung over one shoulder. He passed through an ordinary alleyway, continuing until a gigantic, aging three-story wooden mansion built deep within a dark blue forest appeared before him.
The moment he pushed open the creaking door—
“People all
lie.”
—five pairs of vividly colored eyes turned toward him.
“They say living is all the same
No matter who you are
It’s all basically alike
Everyone’s the same.”
Inserted between the dramatized scenes were individual member sequences.
The first was Choi Jeho.
His room was entirely black—the wallpaper and flooring alike. With no light source inside, the atmosphere felt eerie. Hanging on the wall was an enormous picture frame lined with thick gold trim.
Beneath the empty frame, Choi Jeho lounged crookedly across a massive velvet armchair, plunging a syringe into a perfectly ripe tomato before pulling back the piston. Once the cylinder filled with juice, he opened his mouth and slowly pushed the piston down.
Juice and clumped seeds sprayed from the thick needle.
“They turn around
Watch your reactions
And hide what they really think.”
A white belt hung down above Lee Cheonghyeon’s head after he returned home. Floating in midair as though suspended from the ceiling, Park Juu beamed brightly down at him. Kim Iwol leaned back in his chair and waved.
A glass lamp flickering with candlelight, thick books with peeling leather covers from age, and faded old rugs were captured on screen like photographs from Lee Cheonghyeon’s perspective.
“I want to live
inside my imagination.”
Jeong Seongbin, who had been boiling something vigorously over a cauldron, held out a steaming object toward Lee Cheonghyeon. The container was too bizarrely shaped to call a cup. Hardened layers formed by overflowing liquid had built up thickly around its sides.
“Even if nobody cheers me on.”
Lee Cheonghyeon flung the cup aside, threw off his bag, and burst out through the wooden door.
Kang Giyeon, sprawled across a sofa patched together from different fabrics, frowned and rose from his seat.
The screen shifted to a black grass field.
A thick gravestone standing alone in the middle of the plains slowly zoomed in.
A green-stained hand seized the gravestone, its surface smeared all over with green handprints.
“I’ll be the one
who believes in myself.”
Green eyes gleamed between Kang Giyeon’s dripping dark-blue hair.
The camera shook violently as it chased after Lee Cheonghyeon. At a gesture meant to shake off his pursuer, the camera crashed to the ground.
Lee Cheonghyeon suddenly stopped running.
Green liquid had splattered all the way to his feet.
Wearing a horrified expression, he cautiously walked toward something beyond the frame where Kang Giyeon had collapsed.
Then from beneath the screen, which had been pointing blankly into empty air, a hand holding a beaker suddenly rose up.
The bluish fingertips tilted the beaker upside down and shook it. The loosely sealed cork popped free, and thick black liquid sloshed out sluggishly.
Once the beaker emptied completely, the hand slowly lowered itself.
After a brief pause—
“We all
live while dreaming.”
—Kang Giyeon abruptly sprang upright like a coiled spring, his face drenched and the cork still stuck to his head.
Park Juu pulled aside the curtains with a worried expression and looked out the window. He slipped himself between the curtains and the glass to stop light from leaking inside and pressed his face close to the windowpane.
His silver-gray pupils, narrowed by the sunlight, zoomed in and transformed into a dark brown mahogany round table.
“I don’t understand
why beautiful wishes
become a joke.”
The space that appeared to belong to Park Juu contained only a low round table and a chessboard.
Sitting before the table, Park Juu idly moved a white chess piece before accidentally knocking over a black one. The black piece wearing a wizard hat rolled down over the white fabric pooled around his feet.
“They say it’s ridiculous.”
Choi Jeho picked up Lee Cheonghyeon’s bag, which had been tossed beside the cup. But because he accidentally held it upside down, everything inside spilled across the floor.
A vaguely crumpled sheet of paper fluttered through the air before getting swept into the pile of papers raining down over Kim Iwol’s head.
Kim Iwol lifted his head from beneath the pile, yellowed papers cascading down both sides. One unusually white page caught his eye.
Choi Jeho and Jeong Seongbin leaned over Kim Iwol’s shoulder. Carefully unfolding the paper, they revealed the title written at the top.
Career Aspiration Form.
“They say big dreams
can’t overcome
high walls.”
Kim Iwol stood before a library wall filled with identical notebooks.
Pulling out another notebook of the same design from inside his black long coat, Kim Iwol opened to the final page. After confirming there was no blank space left, he slid it into an empty slot on the bookshelf.
A pale wrist stood out sharply as he tucked a fountain pen into the pocket of the jacket beneath his coat.
“Is there really sincerity
inside all that worry?
I can see through it all.”
What greeted Lee Cheonghyeon and Kang Giyeon when they returned was a rug hanging over the black dead tree outside the house.
The moment they opened the door, pale gray natural light streamed through wide-open curtains to welcome them.
On the neatly cleaned dining table sat a spotless mug free of stains or residue, alongside a single sheet of paper. Steam curled upward from the hot chocolate topped with cute bear-shaped marshmallows.
Looking back and forth between the mug and the living room in disbelief, Lee Cheonghyeon slowly picked up the paper.
[Korean Employment Classification Guide]
“I want to keep dreaming
tomorrow too.”
Even amidst the thick black smoke, Jeong Seongbin’s eyes glowed a vivid purple. Beyond the murky haze stood antique glass bottles filled with herbs and dishes crowding wooden shelves.
Jeong Seongbin uncorked a small bottle filled with deep violet powder. The powder sparkled with glitter mixed into it.
He tasted a bit from his fingertip before slowly pouring it out. The dust drifted through the air like an aurora.
“I want to achieve
everything I desire
with my own hands.”
Water streamed from a grand marble fountain.
Lee Cheonghyeon wet his fingertips and dragged a straight line beneath the statue’s eye. Once the moisture dried, a mark resembling brushed gold powder remained behind. Ripples spread across Lee Cheonghyeon’s golden eyes.
Beside him at the fountain sat a small photograph.
In the picture, Lee Cheonghyeon held a cake overflowing with wild berries and drenched in red syrup running over cream. Instead of tear stains of joy, his face was a mess of dried gold powder.
The soaked and wrinkled employment classification sheet flashed by, followed by the fine streaks of gold powder left on Lee Cheonghyeon’s cheeks like traces of tears.
Lee Cheonghyeon gently scratched at his dried tear tracks.
“Because only I
can hear my own heart.”
The next morning, Lee Cheonghyeon silently left the house.
Everyone watched his retreating figure without saying a word. Even Choi Jeho, wearing sunglasses and draped in Kim Iwol’s black long coat, stared toward Lee Cheonghyeon’s walk to school despite the light pouring through the barely closed door.
A student crossed the classroom collecting papers.
When his turn came, Lee Cheonghyeon quietly handed over his wrinkled career aspiration form.
The smiling student’s expression subtly changed as he accepted it.
Toward the friend glancing between him and the paper, Lee Cheonghyeon flashed a mischievous grin.
≫ I summarized the plot of this MV to my friend and they asked me if today was April Fool’s Day
Of course they did. It’s about a water-attribute nonhuman creature whose tears produce gold dust struggling between a teacher telling him to join the precious metals division of the Korea Mint and research freaks trying to evolve him into the ruler of the seas
└ I wondered what kind of plot could possibly match that teaser and it turns out it’s about a nonhuman creature worrying about career pathsㅋㅋㅋ
└ MV summary: This damn magical creature family!!!
└ ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Thanks to his older brothers and Giyeon supporting him, his dream career became “Pacific Ocean guide”
└ I feel like I’ve heard myths about mermaid tears becoming pearls, but Kim Iwol absolutely refusing to let go of the gold aesthetic is killing meㅋㅋㅋㅋ
≫ It hasn’t even been that long since the Soda Princess cosplay and now they’re giving us Halloween cosplay too?
You guys really had everything planned from the start!
└ Meanwhile Sparklers didn’t even bother trying to guess because we were all busy praising how our boys never spoil anythingㅋㅋ
└ But if you’ve gone through information security training as a Sparkler, that’s the only logical conclusion you can come to
≫ I finally figured out what this feeling of déjà vu is
This familiar B-movie vibe with a weirdly wholesome but clumsy narrative......
It’s the “Flowering” group project all over again
└ No wonder it felt familiar
└ It’s the B-grade storytelling of “Flowering” combined with the aesthetics of “Bright”......
└ Ever since “Bright,” the way they use imagery and color has completely changed, so even though the MV is hilarious it somehow still feels like a horror movie,,, incomprehensible MV
└ Seriously, if you clip out individual scenes it fully looks like an indie horror game, especially the part where Giyeon collapses and revives himself by dumping potion on himself
└ This is exactly the kind of song you listen to in late autumnㅋㅋ They timed it perfectly
≫ Whoever decided to use the night sky as the background for the group choreography deserves a raise
Because of the choreography it seriously feels like they crawl out after dark
└ The details are insane—they used actual constellations visible in autumn. Go read this genius Sparkler’s summary thread
└ No way, I thought they just CG’d random stars in
└ LMAO Lee Cheonghyeon’s Piscesㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Then is Kang Giyeon Aquarius because he carries around revival potionsㅠㅠ
≫ Why are Kim Iwol panicking around while Choi Jeho bumbles through everything so funny
A grim reaper buried under mountain-like workloads and a vampire who accidentally dumps out his younger brother’s backpack
└ It’s supposed to be this fantasy-heavy magical world setting, so why does every one of them seem just slightly lacking in some way
└ The living embodiment of “the kids are nice, though”
└ They used up all the coolness during “Bright,” so there’s none left now
The prerelease track stayed in real-time trends for a long while after release.
People saw the keywords and got drawn in. New viewers made posts of their own, comparing the MV to Spark’s self-produced content and analyzing the characters. Everything exploded at once.
The buzz was overwhelming.
And once the prerelease track caught fire—
≫ I’m so excited for the title track
What the hell are they going to come back with?
—everyone began waiting for the title track’s release.
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