'Doctor X' OST: Kwon Jin-ah's 'Another Day' Asks for Nothing to Happen

The first song from 'Doctor X: Mafia in White' wishes for a day on which nothing happens. SBS's new Friday and Saturday series began at 9:50 pm on 9 October, with Kim Ji-won as Gye Soo-jung, a genius surgeon taking on the rot inside a university hospital. The same evening its first soundtrack single came out: 'Another Day' by Kwon Jin-ah, in Korean 같은 하루, 'the same day'. By the next morning in Korea, 21:50 UTC, its four uploads on YouTube had 19,881 views between them: 7,061 on the official audio on her own channel, 5,748 and 5,284 on two SBS channels, 1,788 on Genie Music's.

'Another Day' lyrics: the same day, please

The song is a thank-you for routine. It opens on someone walking aimlessly, close to what is familiar and afraid to let it slip, taking a hand so that each day can be met one at a time. The chorus, which first arrives 46 seconds in, wants to carry the day along at the end of a long night and into tomorrow, “내일도 같은 하루에”, tomorrow too, in the same day. What it asks of the other person is small: stay where you are, so that the two of them can keep trading everyday greetings.

The second verse, from 1:41, whispers about today with a hopeful heart and says thank you for it. The last lines are new, heard once only: out of all the days, may the two of them get to meet this one, and face each other today as well. For a series sold on a doctor who claims she never fails, the first song asks for the opposite of drama, a tomorrow exactly like today.

Where the song keeps its peak

Our software heard a piano so quiet for the first 14 seconds that the loudness meter barely moves, and its sound classifier filed the first half-minute under lullaby and new-age music. Her voice comes in at 28.5 seconds. The two choruses, at 0:46 and 2:11, are louder but not the top of the song. That comes at 2:49, when the lines heard only once arrive, at 0.82 on our scale, against 0.57 for the first chorus. The piano then has the last 24 seconds almost to itself. The words are by Meego; the music is by GENESIO and Meego, and GENESIO arranged it.

The singer SBS found on its own talent show

Kwon Jin-ah came third on SBS's 'K-pop Star 3' in 2014 and released her first album, 'One Strange Night', in 2016. The top songs on her YouTube Music page are 'I got lucky', 'Consolation', 'Stupid Love', 'Rain on me' and 'White Wine', and her channel has 233,000 subscribers. Twelve years after the talent show, she is the opening voice of the same channel's new Kim Ji-won series. This is the first soundtrack from a Korean series in our reviews of songs on the day they come out.

Our bet

What works for it: Kim Ji-won's last series, 'Queen of Tears', set tvN's ratings record at 24.9 percent in 2024; Netflix Korea has posted this one's trailer; and a first soundtrack single has the whole run of the series in which to be heard. Against it: a hushed first half-minute is a hard sell outside the show, the first-day numbers are small, and a Part 1 can be overtaken by the parts that follow. When we wrote this, the first episode's ratings were not out, and the song's fortunes will follow them.

Our call: 'Another Day' makes the Circle Digital Chart's weekly Top 100 at least once during the series' 12-episode run, by the week of 8 to 14 November.