TAEMIN's Soft Violence Is Two Minds, One Body
Taemin built his solo career on contradiction - the choreography that looks liquid until it snaps into something sharp, the falsetto that turns menacing mid-phrase. PHASE 1: Soft Violence takes that tension and names it outright, splitting eleven tracks into a "Soft" half and a "Violence" half instead of picking a lane. It mostly works, because Taemin has spent a decade proving he can sell both. It doesn't fully cohere, because the album never quite decides how the two halves are supposed to talk to each other.
Six of the eleven songs premiered live at Coachella in April, where Taemin became the first K-pop solo male artist to play the festival. That performance history shows: this is a record built for a stage he's already tested, not a set of demos waiting to be proven. The double lead singles make the split literal. "FLOAT" is airy synth-pop about the specific peace of being with one person while the rest of life stays chaotic - light, pretty, a little slight on its own. "Gooey" is its opposite number, built on classical piano samples dragged through powerful drums and aggressive synth stabs, performance-first in a way that makes "FLOAT" sound like a warm-up act by comparison. Releasing them together as co-leads is a bet that listeners will hear the contrast as the point. Heard back to back, the whiplash mostly lands.
The album's best stretch comes on the harder half. "SKIN" opens on a dark, gritty bassline and stays there, an eerie, electrifying track about shedding an old self - "watch me change shape now" - that never once reaches for a chorus that resolves the tension it builds. "Frankenstein," the Coachella ballad, is the record's clearest statement: raw, cinematic, about reshaping yourself to fit someone else's idea of you and losing them anyway. Taemin sings it at full volume rather than hiding behind the metaphor, which is what makes the title track actually land as tragedy instead of a concept-photo caption. It's the album's best three minutes, and the writing knows it - nothing else on the project reaches for that scale again.
Where the album loses focus is the seam between its two halves. The softer tracks are pleasant without pushing anywhere new for an artist who's already made an entire career out of beautiful, atmospheric pop; a couple of the mid-album cuts could have come from any Taemin project since 2018. The "Soft Violence" concept promises friction between the two moods, but too often the record just alternates between them rather than letting them collide within a single song, which is what "Gooey" and "Frankenstein" do so well individually. Closer "This Is The End" is a fine sendoff - Taemin repositioning himself at the center of his own narrative rather than wrapping up a story - but it resolves the tension the album spent ten tracks building rather than sitting inside it.
Producers SOFTSERVEBOY, Drew Love of the US R&B duo THEY., and Bava - a co-writer on DJ Snake and Selena Gomez's "Taki Taki" - give the record a wider sonic palette than a typical K-pop solo EP, and it shows in how differently "Gooey" and "FLOAT" are built despite sharing a release date. An early review from Melodic Magazine framed the project as Taemin "pushing the boundaries" in both directions at once, which is generous but not wrong about the harder tracks specifically.
PHASE 1: Soft Violence is out now via Galaxy Corporation. Taemin opens his 2026-27 "LiMiNaL" World Tour Sept. 18-20 at Jamsil Indoor Stadium in Seoul before the tour moves to North America and Latin America.
