The Classic is the eleventh studio album of South Korean boy band Shinhwa, in commemoration of their 15th anniversary. It was released on 16 May 2013 by Shinhwa Company and distributed by CJ E&M Music. The group conducted an Asian concert tour, 2013 Shinhwa Grand Tour: The Classic in support of the album, with the first show in Hong Kong on 8 June 2013.
It was first released as a limited edition and followed by a regular Thanks Edition on 21 May. According to Gaon Chart, as of the end of December 2013, the album has sold a cumulative total of 78,727 copies, of both editions.
Album and music video
The album includes 10 tracks produced by producers and lyricists, Ahn Young-min, Kim Do-hyun, Andrew Choi, Neighborhood Brother and Brian Kim; as well as Shinhwa member Lee Min-woo. The album's lead track is "This Love", which was gifted by Lee McCutcheon, James Flannigan and UK producer Andrew Jackson, who also worked on their previous lead track "Venus" from The Return in 2012. It is a British style electronic track, which shares the same characteristics and dreamlike quality as "Venus" but with heavy basses, deep electronics; and a sudden change to light mood at the end. Shin Hye-sung revealed that they had four songs in contention as the lead track and "This Love" was chosen after staff members voted in favour of it by 3-40. As it is seen as a continuation of "Venus" with the same style of electropop beat, yet it is also different.
The track "That's Right" was composed by Kim Do-hyun, who previously composed Lee Hyori's hit song "10 Minutes" from her 2003 album Stylish. Other collaboration with foreign composers is "Hurricane", by Samuel Waelmo, Robert Vadadi and Kim Young-hu. The lyrics for "That's Right", "New Me", "Hurricane" and "I Gave You", as Shinhwa's wedding song, were written by Min-woo.
The music video for "This Love", was shot over two days on 1 and 2 May. It features Japanese actress Fujii Mina, and directed by Cho Soo-hyun, who also directed the music video for Psy's "Gangnam Style" and "Gentleman"; and also the music video for "Once in a Lifetime" from Shinhwa's State of the Art album in 2006. The choreography for the song involves vogue dancing, made popular by Madonna in her music video "Vogue". The dance style involves focusing on expressing the rhythm of the music whilst posing like a model, which has not been attempted by the group nor any Korean idol groups before. They wanted the outfits and dance to convey the feeling from a fashion magazine or runway show, with sophisticated and sensual feelings of men in their thirties. Lee Min-woo said "It was a dance harder to put together than it seems, but it contains individual parts that will let each of us shine. You′ll be able to see a voguing dance remade to fit Shinhwa", Eric further explained, "We took the strengths of the voguing dance and changed it in a Shinhwa way to fit us".
On 10 May 2013, the teaser for the music video was released on Shinhwa's official YouTube channel, and followed by the full MV on 16 May, showcasing various elements of voguing poses and controlled moves, such as hand performance, catwalk, dips and spins.
Release and reception
The album was released as a limited edition of 40,000 copies, in a black tin case with a 100-page colour photo book and lyrics book, with photos by Zo Sun-hee. It was sold out on 8 May 2013, the day pre-order started, with the server of Synnara Music crashing for over an hour due to overwhelming web traffic. To meet the demand Shinhwa Company announced the release of a regular Thanks Edition, with pre-orders available from 10 May, released on 21 May. The regular edition is smaller with a paper out-box emblazoned with Shinhwa's official logo and also contain a 100-page photobook by photographer Zo Sun-hee.
On 13 May, individual teaser photos of Jun Jin and Andy were released, along with a behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot for the album cover with photographer Zo Sun-hee. This was followed by photos of Kim Dong-wan and Shin Hye-sung on 14 May, and a video of the recording process for the album, with the final photos of Eric and Lee Min-woo the following day, as well as another video showing the making-of footage for "This Love" music video.