Songfacts®:

• Stray Kids is an eight-member South Korean boy band comprising Bang Chan, Lee Know, Changbin, Hyunjin, Han, Felix, Seungmin, and I.N. JYP Entertainment formed them through the 2017 reality show of the same name. "Case 143" is the lead single from their mini-album Maxident.
• "Case 143" is a pop and electro-hop track where Stray Kids are smitten with a girl. Sung and rapped in a mixture of South Korean and English, the boys cannot explain why they can't resist their feelings. The Stray Kids liken their confusion about their emotions to an unresolved case – case 143.
• Why case 143? It's a numeric code based on how many letters there are in each word of "I Love You": I (1), Love (4), You (3).
  
  The term "143" for "I love you" was popularized back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when pagers were widely used. Because the devices had limited space for messages and not all supported text, couples used 143 to express their feelings for each other.
  
  Musiq Soulchild recorded a song about the love code titled "143" for his 2000 debut album Aijuswanaseing.
• Stray Kids' Bang Chan, Changbin and Han wrote "Case 143" with the song's producers Raphael, Daviid and Yosia. "We deliver our messages very directly," said Changbin. "I think it's really fresh for us to express love for the first time. The lyrics are direct. They're really clear. I think the song's charm is that we don't beat around the bush in our expression of love."
• Maxident topped the charts in South Korea and the United States. It marked Stray Kids' second record to reach #1 in the US as their mini-album Oddinary reached the summit in April.
• Directed by 725 of SL8, the peculiar music video follows a police investigation into why the Stray Kids have transformed into fuzzy heart-shaped monsters. When the cops, who are also Stray Kids, examine the crime scene, they try to arrest both the troublemaking monsters and monster-inflected band members.