K-pop juggernaut Stray Kids close their new mini album with “This & That (Festival Version),” featuring co-writer Tele, reworking the title track for bigger crowds.
This one closes out an eight-track project already stacked with range. THIS & THAT dropped as the group’s tenth mini album, arriving ahead of their STRAYCITY tour across Latin America this September. Tele actually helped write and arrange the original title track alongside 3RACHA, The Monsters & Strangerz, and Isaiah Tejada, so bringing that same creative voice into this festival flip keeps things connected rather than bolted on.
Production heightens the rhythmic energy while keeping the original’s relaxed confidence intact. Grammy-winning engineer Manny Marroquin mixed the whole project at Larrabee Studios, and that polish carries through here too. Nothing about the rework loses what made the original groove work, it just pushes everything louder for a live setting.
Bang Chan, Changbin, and Han still anchor the group’s easygoing delivery, trading the same playful lines about doing everything twice over. Tele’s arrangement touch shapes how the track breathes differently here, built for crowd singalongs rather than headphone listening. That shift in intention is exactly what a festival version needs.
This & That (Festival Version) works because it knows exactly what environment it’s built for, immediate, communal, made to move a stadium.
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