TAEMIN Returns With Double Title Track EP 'Phase 1: Soft Violence'

 

TAEMIN released his sixth solo EP, "Phase 1 : Soft Violence," at 6 p.m. KST on August 31 - his first solo material since 2024's "Eternal." The 11-track album carries two title tracks instead of one, "Float" and "Gooey," a structure his agency Galaxy Corporation confirmed when it revealed the full tracklist earlier this month.

"Float," produced by SOFTSERVEBOY, is built around a mellifluous pop melody. "Gooey" sits in a heavier, more physical register. Between the two title tracks, the album folds in three more new songs - "This Is the End," "Easy Loving You" and "Skin" - alongside six songs TAEMIN first performed live at Coachella in April: "Let Me Be the One," "Permission," "Sober," "1004," "Parasite" and "Frankenstein."

That April set carried its own weight. TAEMIN became the first Korean male solo artist to headline a Coachella stage, a booking he followed over the summer with an appearance at the UK's BST Hyde Park. "Phase 1 : Soft Violence" effectively studio-packages that live run into a full release, six months after the festival performances first introduced the songs to a global audience.

The album ships in six physical formats - Sweet, Bitter, Silent, Brutal, Nemo and a Keyring NFC edition - each built around a different visual concept, from softer pastel imagery to harsher black-and-red versions. Galaxy Corporation has framed "Phase 1" as the opening chapter of a longer arc, without detailing what a second phase involves. The double-title-track structure has drawn its own attention in early coverage, read less as an inability to pick a single and more as two competing halves of the same idea - "Float" pulling toward something lighter, "Gooey" pulling the other way.

"Phase 1 : Soft Violence" is TAEMIN's sixth EP as a solo artist, a catalog that stretches back to his 2014 solo debut and now sits alongside his ongoing work as a member of SHINee, a group that debuted in 2008. The two-year gap since "Eternal" is the longest between his solo releases to date, a stretch that included the Coachella and BST Hyde Park bookings rather than a conventional album cycle - a sequence that put TAEMIN in front of festival crowds who had never necessarily followed a K-pop solo act before hearing these songs performed live.

TAEMIN does not plan to sit on the release. His second world tour, LiMiNaL, opens at Seoul's Jamsil Indoor Stadium on September 18, three nights before he carries the new songs to arenas across North America, Latin America and Europe through the rest of the year.