June 21, 2024 arrived as a deadline and an opening at once. NewJeans were not new by then. They had debuted on July 22, 2022 and in 2023 had turned a sequence of small, strange singles into a global architecture. Their 2023 cycle culminated in the EP Get Up, records of stature that placed the group in arenas and on international charts. The trajectory was clear. The question was what shape their next move would take when the world expected novelty and the group wanted a new market.

ADOR announced on March 27, 2024 that NewJeans would issue two double singles in 2024. That announcement set the calendar and set the tone. The first of those releases, How Sweet, arrived in late May. It had already shown the group pivoting into threads of international pop while keeping the spare, intimate phrasing that defined them. The follow up had to do two things. It had to introduce NewJeans to a new national audience. It had to do so without losing the economy of their sound.

The choice to make June 21, 2024 the day of release was a deliberate one. NewJeans entered Japan with the package titled Supernatural - Single. The title track bore a visible lineage. It contained an interpolation of a 2009 composition co-written by Pharrell Williams. That connection was not decorative. It was structural. Bringing Pharrell into the credits changed the vernacular of the record. It pushed the single into the language of late 1990s and early 2000s groove while asking NewJeans to sing through that lineage on their own terms.

The rollout was boxed with visual and cultural partners who mattered. Takashi Murakami contributed to the video and to single artwork. Hiroshi Fujiwara joined on a capsule fashion collection and pop-up merchandising. The single arrived not merely as a record but as a cultural drop. NewJeans’ Japanese debut was staged as a multi-disciplinary event. The music could not be read apart from the visuals, the goods, and the live dates that followed, including the fan meeting at Tokyo Dome on June 26 and 27, 2024.

The single lists 250 as producer. That line is a fulcrum. 250 is NewJeans’ long-time collaborator. He is the architect behind the group’s lean, beat-forward palate. On Supernatural he reshaped an older Pharrell motif into a New Jack Swing reading. Producers do translation work. 250’s role here was translation as reinvention.

The interpolation at the heart of Supernatural is traceable. The song borrows a bridge and ad-libs from Manami and Pharrell Williams’ 2009 track “Back of My Mind.” ADOR’s description and press statements said Pharrell revisited those elements and that 250 reinterpreted them in a New Jack Swing style. Reportedly, Pharrell is credited as a composer and lyricist on the track. That shared credit altered the production posture. The arrangement had to answer an American pop lineage while remaining faithful to NewJeans’ vocal minimalism.

Technically the single arrives small and taut. The released product contains four tracks: two songs and their instrumental counterparts. The lead cut runs about 3:11. The B-side, Right Now, runs about 2:40. Listeners and DJs received instrumentals alongside the finished songs. That choice foregrounds production. Instrumentals expose arrangement decisions: programmed drum timbre, bassline placement, reverb choices on percussion, the way a synthetic staccato bass breathes against vocal space. The sonic world of the record is produced rather than performed in the old sense. The voice is framed as an object within a beat.

Concrete studio addresses and session musician credits for these sessions are not widely published. What is verifiable is the production signature. Press coverage and music reporting described the sound as “retro Neptunes-esque” and New Jack Swing inspired. Hypebeast and Pitchfork noted the Neptunes lineage and Pharrell’s intervening role. Where the single was recorded and which live instrumentalists, if any, were used remain details that ADOR and the production team did not fully publicize in standard liner-note fashion. For this record the emphasis was deliberately on production voice and visual authorship rather than on session-player roll calls.

Supernatural

This is the hinge. The song credits 250, Pharrell Williams, and Ylva Dimberg as composers and lists Gigi and Minji among its lyricists as well. What you hear is a careful collision. 250 builds a buoyant, clipped rhythm and a bassline that bounces like a compact toy. Pharrell’s contribution is not a cameo. The bridge and ad-libbed phrase-work from his 2009 composition are woven into the song’s anatomy. The result reads as nostalgia worn forward. The vocal lines keep the NewJeans minimalism: short phrases, near-whispers, pauses that let the beat breathe. Lyrically the song trades in light romantic yearning and the image of something just outside ordinary sense. The title word, supernatural, works as both image and affect. It suggests a heat that is not strictly emotional. In sequence, the track opens the single by establishing a hybrid vocabulary. It calls on Neptunes-era craft and then hands the groove to NewJeans’ younger clarity.

Right Now

The B-side positions itself differently. Composed by Frnk and Lolo Zouaï with lyrics credited to Gigi, Lolo Zouaï, and Satomoka, the song leans into a percussion-forward, drum-and-bass adjacent groove that reporters and reviewers described as close to the sambass subgenre. It arrived with a pre-release music video on June 17, 2024 that partnered with Takashi Murakami. The video reframes the group as animated characters modeled in the style of The Powerpuff Girls, a motif NewJeans had referenced previously. The song’s vocal delivery is crisp and machine-friendly. Where “Supernatural” is retro-cool, “Right Now” is immediate and kinetic. The lyrics speak in the present tense and in a language mix that includes Japanese lines used for the Japanese market. Functionally the track balances the single. It pushes tempo and color after the smolder of the A-side. The Murakami visuals and the track’s placement in a Lotte Wellfood Zero advertisement before release made it a cross-platform asset. It read as both a radioable single and a tie-in for a marketing universe.

Supernatural (Instrumental)

The instrumental is not an afterthought. At 3:11 it offers a direct line to 250’s arrangement choices. Without vocals the song’s interpolation and the treatment of Pharrell’s bridge become clearer. Listen for the pocket in the snare and the understated swing on off-beats. The mix gives bass frequencies room. Reverb on percussive transients is dialed to keep the groove dry and forward. The instrumental invites remixes, DJ edits, and study. It also reveals how much the song depends on production texture to carry emotional weight.

Right Now (Instrumental)

Running 2:40, this instrumental lays bare the song’s drum programming and hi-hat complexity. The track is compact. Its percussion fills are frequent and communicative. Where “Supernatural (Instrumental)” foregrounds pocket and low end, this instrumental highlights motion. The synth pads that color the chorus are thin and in motion. The instrumental underscores how the single was crafted as a short, repeatable pop moment rather than an expansive sonic canvas.

As a sequence the four tracks perform a small drama. The title track opens with a study in retro-philic craft and restraint. The B-side turns the energy outward with animated visuals and a more immediate, faster pulse. The instrumentals close the loop and invite further use. The single spends eleven minutes and forty-two seconds making a single, coherent case. It is compact by design. It reads as an introduction to a market and as a clear statement about how NewJeans wanted their sound to be heard when every other aspect of the release was being leveraged as event.

The release week produced immediate, measurable traction. The single reached high positions on several charts. It debuted in the top ten on the Japan Hot 100 and reached the top positions on Oricon’s daily single ranking. Reporting from Oricon and contemporaneous music coverage recorded the single hitting the top of daily charts in Japan in late June 2024. On international aggregators the song entered the Billboard Global 200 and placed within various regional charts, including South Korea’s Circle chart. Those numbers turned the single into both a market entry and a chart statement.

Critical reaction framed the record in two registers. Many reviewers named the collaboration with Pharrell Williams as the most newsworthy element. Observers recognized the interpolation and cited it as a defining choice that allowed NewJeans to negotiate an older American pop idiom. Several outlets described the production as Neptunes-esque and noted 250’s reinterpretation in a New Jack Swing key. Beyond the production story reviewers paid attention to what the record asked the group to do: inhabit a groove that is at once nostalgic and referential while preserving vocal restraint.

Fans and cultural partners amplified the release. Takashi Murakami’s animated video for “Right Now” and the capsule merchandise with Hiroshi Fujiwara ensured the single did not live only as sound. The video, the pop-ups, and a fan meeting at Tokyo Dome later that month acted as a single promotional environment. Reports noted heavy attendance at the Tokyo Dome engagements and rapid pre-order sales for physical configurations that included Murakami-designed drawstring and crossbody bag formats. Those sales choices signaled that the record was a commercial object meant to circulate in multiple formats.

Over the months after release the song entered year-end conversations. It appeared on several best-of lists for 2024 compiled by outlets covering global pop. Notably, New York-based coverage singled out the track for its stylistic precision. The placement of the single within year-end lists reframed it from a market entry to a piece of pop testimony. The long view will measure whether the record changed sonic practice in wider scenes. For now the single registered as a carefully staged bridge between markets and as a demonstration of how NewJeans’ production choices could fold older pop vocabulary into a contemporary K-pop idiom.