The day a whole drawer got opened — Stray Kids' 'SKZ-REPLAY 2026 Pt.1'

In three lines

• Stray Kids released the digital album 'SKZ-REPLAY 2026 Pt.1' at midnight on August 1.
• Seventeen tracks: unreleased self-written songs and member solos previously performed only live.
• It's the first half of a two-part plan, with Pt.2 to follow.

Seventeen tracks at once

The release landed at midnight on August 1. Not a studio album or a mini but a digital album, and the count is seventeen.

Item	Detail
Album	Digital album 'SKZ-REPLAY 2026 Pt.1'
Release	August 1, midnight
Tracks	17
Title track	'Battle Ground (Korean Ver.)'
Next	'SKZ-REPLAY 2026 Pt.2' scheduled

Seventeen tracks is close to two studio albums' worth. Calling it a new record is awkward, though. It isn't a gathering of newly written songs so much as a pulling-out of things that already existed but were never formally released.

Where these songs were

The tracks come from several places: songs put out through their own content, solos a member sang alone at a show, and self-written material that hadn't gone anywhere yet.

Songs like these usually stay scattered — somewhere on a video platform, somewhere in a concert record. Fans know them, but you can't stream them. This album tidies that state.

The word 'replay'

The album's name carries the word replay — to play again.

The title says first that this isn't an album of new songs but one that pulls back out what's already passed. The cassette-shaped cover art sits in the same logic: a medium you rewind and hear again.

Not many groups can do this format. It only works if members write their own songs and those songs pile up without a natural place to go. There has to be something in the drawer before you can open it.

Why split it in two

This is Pt.1, with Pt.2 scheduled. Seventeen tracks out, and there's still more.

Not releasing everything at once is probably about volume. Thirty songs arriving together is hard to take in, and individual tracks get buried easily. Splitting gives the first seventeen time to settle.

How to hear seventeen tracks

Don't try to take them all in one sitting. With an album like this, picking the ones that catch you and repeating them beats running the sequence to the end.

A collected album is uneven by nature — the songs were made at different times for different purposes. That unevenness is the album's character. It's less a polished single statement than a record with several timestamps mixed into it.

Starting with the member solos is one approach. That's where what changes between singing as a team and singing alone shows most clearly.

That's the last of the numbers. Now, the music.