Heavy is the head that wears the crown. RM, the leader of BTS, appears to know this reality all too effectively. Because the seven-member group skyrocketed to the world stage, the 28-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer discovered himself changing into not solely as his band’s de facto spokesperson attributable to his English fluency, but in addition an envoy for his dwelling nation of South Korea and Asians throughout the diaspora. Although praised for his shifting speeches on the United Nations Normal Meeting (thrice!) and the White House, he’s spoken concerning the mounting pressures of getting to signify the opinions of others.
“I debuted as a singer and occurred to tackle a duty in society, and even the world,” he stated in June, when the band introduced that they’d be pausing group promotions. “In a manner, we would not even be certified for all these issues.”
On his debut solo album Indigo, the artist born Kim Namjoon reclaims his pen, lastly unrestricted from the duty to be something however himself. Although he compares his life to a portray “on fixed show” on the upbeat hip-hop monitor “Nonetheless Life,” he raps of dashing ahead on his personal phrases, liberated from the regrets of yesterday and expectations of tomorrow. “Ya can’t lock me within the body, I’m shifting,” collaborator Anderson .Paak sings within the hook, accompanied by jazzy horn blasts. Created with this reinstated self-commitment, Indigo is an adventurous sonic portrait of RM’s internal world, the work of an artist who finds his voice by bringing collectively the influences that resonate together with his soul.
Eager for a time earlier than the pressures of capitalist art-making, RM raps about getting again in contact together with his youthful self on album opener “Yun.” “I wanna be a human, earlier than I do some artwork,” he raps with willpower over a dusty boom-bap beat, after Erykah Badu provides her sagacious vocals concerning the significance of silence. The track’s hook is a reinterpretation of recommendation from the late South Korean painter Yun Hyong-keun, whose voice was sampled for the monitor, and is thought for his monochrome work that mixed Korean conventional ink calligraphy with Western abstraction.
In related style, on “Yun,” RM synthesizes his appreciation for Korean up to date artwork with Nineties American golden-age hip-hop and R&B, paying respect to their improvements and making a sonic assembly floor for these two legends to satisfy. The thrilling mixture is a reminder of RM’s earlier bibliography-building on BTS songs, during which he has alluded to each Haruki Murakami and Jungian philosophy—making a universe of references which have made their music so easy to get lost in.
Constructing upon the sense of frigid loneliness that pervaded his 2018 mixtape mono, Indigo is a undertaking that’s full of RM’s reflections on alienation. On the stadium rock-influenced pop monitor “Lonely,” RM sings about being in trapped in resort rooms, surrounded by “buildings that I don’t know,” whereas “Nearer,” an atmospheric R&B track that includes British singer-songwriter Mahalia and Korean-Canadian rapper Paul Blanco, sees him craving late at evening for somebody who’s acquired him “rolling within the deep.” In the meantime, “Change” has RM bitterly recounting every thing and everybody that’s modified round him, because the manufacturing abruptly shifts from a jagged digital beat to jazzy piano chords.
RM isn’t utterly alone on Indigo, which invitations in a bunch of collaborators, from rising Korean indie artists like Colde and Kim Sawol, to musicians he grew up listening to, like Tablo of the hip-hop group Epik Excessive, with whom he trades verses about forging your individual path on “All Day.” The sunshine acoustic guitar ballad “No. 2” additionally notably options parkjiyoon, singer of the 2000 Ok-pop hit “Grownup Ceremony,” an artist who has gone on to launch music on her personal label after claiming her former company gave her a picture that introduced her debilitating public criticism. That have makes her phrases about not trying again all of the extra poignant.
Previous, current, and future all meet on Indigo standout “Wild Flower,” an explosive rock monitor whose choruses discover Youjeen, the lead singer of beloved Korean rock band Cherry Filter, pledging to “shine throughout the sky” like a “flowerwork.” Although the verses allude to RM’s countless anxieties—”When’s this wretched masks lastly going to return off,” he raps in exhaustion—he makes use of the image of an exploding blossom to signify his hope, and paints the picture of an open subject as a spot the place he can reconnect together with his goal and internal baby.
Towards the track’s finish, RM remembers his earliest days as a boy whose “begin was poetry / My one and solely energy and dream that protected me up to now.” It’s a reminder that his writing has change into his superpower, as hundreds of thousands around the globe have recognized together with his introspective, deeply felt lyrics. Simply as he’s discovered consolation and resilience by means of the artwork that’s impressed him, Indigo is RM’s likelihood to do the identical for his hundreds of thousands of listeners right now.
