WANT

The seven-track mini-album, ‘Want’, is his fourth Korean solo album, the follow-up to the impeccable ‘Move’, released in October 2017. “I spent about a total of one year preparing for the ‘WANT’ album,” he estimates. “There were a lot of changes made to it during the process because I really wanted it to reflect my music style, and to connect this album to ‘Move’.”

As an album, explains Taemin, “it’s really focused on feelings closer to desire and craving, I wanted to really solidify this concept.”

In the single’s video, the symbolism is biblical (serpents, a neon cross, Rodin’s giant Gates of Hell), sexual (spiderwebs, wet skin, a red palette underpinning the lighting and styling), but also perhaps personal as magnifying glasses cluster in front of his face to mimic the scrutiny he bears as a performer.

The album is quintessentially his sound – pulsing synths and an airy vocal hook on ‘Artistic Groove’, his love of showy strings and grandiose choruses on ‘Shadow’. Or ‘the album’s cut, ‘Truth’, on which Taemin, feeling that the word ‘love’ in songs has become banal, swaps it with the notion that transparent honesty and sincerity can effect the same or greater meaning.