Behind Photos, Halloween Concerts, And A Mystery Code Signal Start Of Road To Comeback For…

K-Pop — Dreamcatcher Recall

K-Pop’s Dreamcatcher kicked off the path to their October 2022 comeback in late September with a flurry of news, content, and their traditional mystery code release.

We’ve known that Dreamcatcher was planning an October comeback for quite some time, leaving fans excited with anticipation about new music from one of K-Pop’s most unique girl groups. This anticipation has only grown since the group’s last release in April, which netted them their long-waited first music show win and which dovetailed into a successful summer tour in North America along with a couple of Europe-based festival appearances.

The wait seemed to officially be over this past week, as Dreamcatcher dropped both their standard Behind photos from the last comeback and their mystery code for the next within hours of each other. We’re now officially on the road to comeback for K-Pop’s resident rock/pop girl group, and if that wasn’t enough, a ton of other content dropped last week that pointed to the group’s future plans. Let’s take a look at everything we learned from the past week from a Dreamcatcher perspective, both for past and future content!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ih8Y7P_MO8[/embed][embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4GpQooBs6I[/embed][embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6MCr4b528E[/embed]

A triple helping of prior Dreamcatcher work was handed down to us this past week from the group’s official YouTube channel, as we had the final part of the general 2022 NA tour Dreamcatcher Notes, the beginning of another individual vlog from that tour from Siyeon, and a behind-the-scenes account of the photoshoot for one of Dreamcatcher’s concept photobooks sold this summer, Love Catcher.

I’ve really enjoyed the tour content as it’s come out over the past few weeks, mostly because they are extremely generous with the sheer amount of it (on average 16–20 minutes per video) and for them being so open about what they’re doing, whether that’s messing around with each other, doing informal how-to’s (like with Yoohyeon’s selfie class), or just generally appreciating and recognizing the amount of fan support they’ve gotten. Knowing more about how they spent time happily eating, performing, and being mostly relaxed about things makes me appreciate all their hard work this summer all the more.

That appreciation extends to the concept books as well. Doing a “rock” set of photos seems to have been one of those goals that Dreamcatcher wanted to achieve since debut, and all of the fun (and professional) ways the staff helped the group achieve that was nice to see. Siyeon, especially, seems to have been waiting and living for this to happen — her past pre-debut rock band member self would have been ecstatic to see these photos happen.

[embed]https://weverse.io/dreamcatcher/live/4-104856609[/embed][embed]https://weverse.io/dreamcatcher/live/4-104856609[/embed]

A pair of voice-only Weverse lives were also dropped in this week, as both SuA and Yoohyeon decided to check in with fans. With all the comeback content, the “please tell us a spoiler” chat was in full force, both both Dreamcatcher members were predictably for the most part mum about anything about what they have in store for fans. SuA went the furthest, singing literally the key of the first syllable of the song, while Yoohyeon finally ceded the “spoiler queen” title to Handong, who she jokingly chided for “doing a lot of spoilers” lately. Either way, we’re likely to hear about what’s coming up for Dreamcatcher’s latest album release in the coming weeks, and the slow burn of that buildup has always been part and parcel for the K-pop industry — but it’s still fun for fans to try to ask.

That seemingly slow-moving road began in earnest this past week, as the 20th and 21st of September 2022 brought us the first steps towards Dreamcatcher’s latest album release. First, as is tradition, came the “Behind” tagged photos from the previous comeback, a set of high-quality behind-the-scenes concept photos from the group’s shoots for the album. Unlike prior postings, however, Dreamcatcher Company decided to drop all the sets at once, as opposed to doing so over days or even weeks, as has been done before. The sense from fans used to another kind of cadence was that Dreamcatcher Company may have been preparing to speed run it a bit given how close we are to October, but obviously, nobody complained at seeing a ton of great Dreamcatcher photos from the group’s “warriors/divine beings out to save the planet” motif.

That speed run continued as within hours of the Behind photos came the Mystery Code, a cryptic letter talking in code about the group’s concept. Smart fans immediately began work on solving the puzzle, and as seems to be the case for the last two years, did so within the hour. Here’s one solution posted by Nico on the Dreamcatcher Discord:

Using the lone unencrypted phrase in the mystery code (FOLLOWUS) as the key, a Vigniere cipher with an offset of 7 appeared to be the way to decrypt the letter. This seems to talk about the continuation of the story in MAISON — with the group on the planet in response to pleas to “save” it, it’s up to them to lead the way to restore it. As always, this is cool to read about and see, as Dreamcatcher’s world-building and storylines have been a part of all of their albums — and as a bonus, we got the potential album name (Apocalypse: Follow Us seems to be in the same vein as “Save Us”) and the title track (“Vision”, called out in capital letters and somewhat spoiled by various Dreamcatcher members via “V” signs in content). We have yet to see the Comeback Scheduler, the next content piece to drop, as of this writing, but it should be soon in coming, and give us a further idea of when we’re likely to see brand new Dreamcatcher music continuing a neat, sci-fi planet-saving plotline.

[embed]https://twitter.com/_mymusictaste/status/1572964086501224450[/embed]

But the Mystery Code wasn’t the only inkling of Dreamcatcher’s future plans. Continuing in the tradition of the past couple of years, Dreamcatcher is going to have a Halloween concert, a continuation of their Apocalypse World Tour in 2022 titled “Broken Halloween”. The site will be the 2,000-person capacity KBS Arena in Seoul, and it’ll be a two-day affair on the 29th and 30th of October, with the latter being also online for international fans and those unable to attend in person.

It seemed inevitable that the return to offline concerts would include their home turf in South Korea, and domestic InSomnia will have the benefit of seeing Dreamcatcher in a dedicated full concert setting for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Local fans got a taste of this during Dreamcatcher’s mini-concert for April’s comeback, but it’ll be great for them to once again get to see Dreamcatcher for a full set of song and subunit performances. Thankfully, international fans will also get to see how Dreamcatcher tops their solo and subunit performances from years prior, especially as they will likely be in costume to do so. How will SuA top her prior “Hellboy” and “Statue” costumes without the benefit of time and a pre-recording (as it’s a live show with a required quick costume change)? Who will perform together in the subunits? What, besides the recent songs will be in the setlist? All these questions will be answered in due time, but for now, the excitement of an upcoming set of concerts is no doubt enough for fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_VYw-2WoRI

Finally, we got another tease for an individual activity from one of Dreamcatcher’s members in the form of a teaser for multiple artists for “Mushroom Live” season 2, titled “Last Woman Standing”. The teaser showed Dreamcatcher’s Dami along with other artists with a serious, pensive look on her face to reflect the video’s foreboding feeling. After doing some research, the company backing this appears to have a somewhat eclectic concept where artists perform live covers or songs set in artificial nature settings (including, not surprisingly, mushrooms and other fungi). Prior artists I’m personally familiar with have included KARD’s Jiwoo, and besides Dami, it appears LESSERA FIM’s Chaewon (also formerly of well-known all-star competition group IZ*ONE) and Sunwoojunga (who had Dami feature on one of her releases, “Buffalo”, in 2021) will also be participating. The tagline for this season’s solos/covers appears to be “Strange But Strong”, so I’ll be very interested to see what Dami has in store for us on October 20th, when her content releases on the channel. Between this and JiU’s upcoming individual appearance on Hey News, it seems the group is beginning to slightly branch out on their own to various variety channels, and that’s encouraging to see in order to provide more dimension to fans as artists.

Details are starting to surface regarding Dreamcatcher’s upcoming release, and this next week is sure to have more tantalizing stuff for fans to look forward to. As always, I’ll be here reporting on all the latest, so be sure to clap, subscribe, and signal boost this article and all the others if you like what you’re reading! See you then.