D's WAVE

The record

D’s WAVE is the first solo mini album Daesung released in Korea, out on 8 April 2025 with eight tracks. The title track is ‘Universe’. The album introduction on Bugs states that it gathers his musical changes under the word wave, and that he took part in the writing and composing. Newsis, reporting the release from his agency RND Company, wrote that he had spent two years on the record and is credited on five of the eight songs. By that account the band The Rose worked on ‘그 시절의 우리 (Us Before)’, the rapper Han Yo Han features on ‘Last girl’, the singer-songwriter Sunwoojunga wrote ‘Wolf’, and the producer Nathan worked on ‘Umbrella’.

Reviews

The music critic Kim Sung-dae reviewed the record for ize (아이즈) six days after release. He begins his verdict by saying plainly that D’s WAVE is a well-made album, and that Daesung filled the mini album with the intention of making a proper start as a solo musician. On what holds it together he wrote that the unified energy comes of Daesung having taken the producer’s chair as well — in film terms, the director playing the lead. On its scale he wrote that the track count alone is twice that of an ordinary mini album and that the finish is not short of a full-length. Of the singing he wrote that what to listen for in Daesung’s performance is expression and command of a song.

Among the tracks

Kim names three songs. The opener, ‘Beautiful Life’, he calls a bright, clean rock number, and he sets pop-rock down as the genre at the album’s centre. ‘그 시절의 우리 (Us Before)’ he calls the most striking song on the record: written with The Rose, a band better known abroad than at home, it sounds to him like twenty years of alternative rock compressed into one track. Of ‘Wolf’, which Sunwoojunga wrote, arranged and composed, he wrote that once Daesung takes the microphone the song quietly erases its author’s shadow and puts the singer’s craft in front.

After it

Newsis reported that Daesung would open his Asia tour, ‘D’s WAVE in Seoul’, at the Olympic Hall in Seoul’s Olympic Park on 26 and 27 April, in the same month as the release.