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Before Jimin was sure he could release a solo debut album, his fellow BTS members believed in him first.
It was last spring, and the group was in Las Vegas, carrying out the last shows on their “Permission to Dance on Stage” stadium tour. In between nights, he opened up to his brother-like band members over drinks and told them about the self-doubt he’d been experiencing during the pandemic. That’s when he received the encouragement he needed from the group, who will celebrate their 10-year anniversary this summer, and felt prepared enough to embark on his own project.
“I was thinking things like, ‘Why am I living like this? What am I doing right now?’” he tells Rolling Stone through an interpreter, speaking on an early spring morning from the HYBE office in Seoul. His bandmates assured him that everyone goes through these growing pains. They suggested that expressing himself through music could offer a way forward.
Now, the 27-year-old artist from Busan, South Korea is preparing his vision as a solo pop star with Face, a captivating six-track album. Across the project, which is full of various sonic moods that veer from spiky and hard-hitting to velvety and sleek, Jimin portrays the conflicting feelings he’s had about himself and his journey as an artist. Though he wasn’t originally a singer when he joined Big Hit Entertainment at age 16, he’s developed one of K-pop’s most unique voices: It’s sweet, with delicately sharp edges, and he contorts his vowels as if they were soft curls of smoke. Through these subtle inflections, he conveys bitter isolation on the melancholic R&B song “Alone,” but then quickly switches to explosive anger on “Set Me Free Pt. 2.” On that boisterous, horn-laden hip-hop track, he proclaims that he’s entering a new era where he “won’t hide anymore even if it hurts,” singing as if he’s gritting his teeth.
The project is a bold evolution from Jimin’s work in BTS, where he’s shown his penchant for making emotional R&B through tracks like 2016’s “Wings” and the sultry Latin-pop-inflected “Filter.” In 2018, he showed he could take on an acoustic singer-songwriter approach with his debut solo single “Promise” — which recently got an official release after living only on SoundCloud for years. For the upcoming Face singles, he’s also been teasing meticulously prepared performances, which have become a signature for the skilled dancer whose fluid yet powerful style is informed by his background in modern dance and martial arts. (To see the full scope of his talent, fans can watch his viral contemporary dance to “I Need U” at the 2019 MMA awards, where he flips and spins effortlessly as if he were wind personified, or his scene-stealing performance in 2020’s “Black Swan.”) He’s come a long way since he was a teenager impersonating the sensual performance style of his role model, Big Bang’s Taeyang; this January, he experienced a full circle moment when he was featured on the K-pop veteran’s long-awaited solo track “Vibe.”
Jimin explores a mesmerizing mix of emotions on the album’s lead single “Like Crazy,” which will come in both English and Korean versions. He found inspiration in the 2011 Drake Doremus-directed drama of the same name. Struck by the film’s depiction of a passionate romance between a British woman and American man whose relationship can never stabilize because of visa issues and their respective careers, he tried to convey these ambiguous feelings through the song’s choreography. He’s a perfectionist to his core: When I tell him that I’m looking forward to these performances, his response is simply, “I’ll work hard.”
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