MONSTA X 'The Phase' — One Voice Driving a Comeback
MONSTA X's 14th EP is the first thing the full group has released together in a year, and it sounds like it: six tracks that hold together as a mood rather than a hit parade, anchored by a member who's spent that year proving he didn't need the other five. My overall assessment is that "The Phase" is a disciplined, better-sequenced record than most of the group's recent output, because it commits to one register instead of chasing a different trend on every track, even though it leans so heavily on Jooheon's writing that the other members occasionally sound like guests on their own comeback.
Jooheon wrote, composed or arranged four of the six songs here, including the title track "MAGIC," a role that's grown out of a solo run that's arguably his strongest stretch as an artist. His January EP "(INSANITY)" charted on iTunes K-pop lists in two dozen countries, and that momentum is audible in how confidently "MAGIC" is built: rhythmic guitar under a strong, insistent beat, with the vocal arrangement stacked rather than traded off between members. It's the version of MONSTA X's usual aggression with the edges sanded down - closer to controlled tension than the group's older, more maximalist singles, and it works because the restraint sounds deliberate rather than cautious.
The record's best moment isn't the title track, though. It's Hyungwon's self-written "Sweet Night, Sweet Morning," the one song here not filtered through Jooheon's pen, and the difference shows. Where the rest of the EP works from a single narrative - the members are cast as figures wandering a mysterious mansion in the rollout's teaser videos - this track sounds like it was written by someone thinking about a person instead of a concept. It's the one place on "The Phase" where MONSTA X sounds less like a brand executing a season and more like six people who've been doing this together for over a decade.
Not every track earns that. "Type X" is the weakest link, an efficient but forgettable placeholder that exists mostly to give the tracklist momentum between "MAGIC" and the rest of the record. "Survivor," another Jooheon credit, sits somewhere in between it and the title track - a competent continuation of "MAGIC's" energy that never quite earns its own identity, the kind of song built to work live and disappear from the playlist afterward. "That's My Girl" is the closest thing here to a straightforward pop single, and the track most likely to travel outside the group's existing fanbase, even though it has the least connection to the mansion concept driving everything else.
That imbalance is the record's real tension. Six tracks split between one member's vision and everyone else executing it is a familiar shape in K-pop comebacks generally, but MONSTA X built its identity on being a genuinely collaborative unit - multiple members contributing writing and production across its catalog rather than one dominant voice carrying the load. "The Phase" doesn't abandon that history so much as quietly narrow it for one release, and whether that reads as a deliberate creative choice or a scheduling convenience will depend on what the group does with whatever comes next.
The mansion concept itself is the album's real gamble, and it's a mixed one. Building an entire EP's marketing around an unexplained shared space - Minhyuk finding Santa tied up in a room, Shownu popping a balloon to human size, Kihyun headbanging through confetti - is a stronger hook as a teaser campaign than as something six songs actually deliver on. The tracks don't reference the mansion directly; they simply arrive alongside it. That's a marketing choice more than a musical one, and it's the gap between "The Phase" as a rollout and "The Phase" as a record on its own terms.
Still, this is a group more than a decade into its run finding a way to sound current without chasing anyone else's playbook, and that's not nothing. "The Phase" doesn't reinvent MONSTA X. It just proves the six of them can still make something that sounds like one coherent thing, even when one member wrote most of it.
The Phase is out now via Starship Entertainment. MONSTA X's "THE X: NEXUS" world tour resumes its North American leg October 3 in Fairfax, Virginia.
