Echo

The record

Echo is Jin’s second mini album, released on 16 May 2025 with seven tracks and ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ as the title track. YENA joins him on ‘Loser’. The album introduction on Bugs says the record holds the way the moments of a life spread out like a resonance, that it is filled with pop and rock over band sound, and that Jin took part in writing several of the songs. The same text puts it about six months after his first solo album, Happy.

The label prints English titles for two of the songs in Apple Music’s own distribution metadata: ‘구름과 떠나는 여행’ is With the Clouds and ‘오늘의 나에게’ is To Me, Today. The English-language press took both up under those names.

Reviews

Clash gave the record eight out of ten on the day of release. The piece, written by Maria Letícia L. Gomes, opens: “Six months after his warm solo debut ‘Happy’, BTS’ Jin returns with ‘Echo’ — an album that doesn’t just reflect where he’s been, but where he’s going.” The same review says that “‘Echo’ is built around band instrumentation — spanning orchestral Brit rock, jangly pop-punk, wistful country, and alternative ballads — all woven into a cohesive whole”.

NME’s Rhian Daly wrote the same day that “across its seven tracks, it delivers everything from classic piano-led pop-rock to takes on alt-rock and country-rock”, each track “backed up by a band rather than digital layers of sound”. On the title she wrote: “‘Echo’ is an appropriate title for Jin’s second album. Following just six months after ‘Happy’, it’s not worlds apart from its predecessor but presents a slightly distorted, changed version of that record’s sound, like how an echo of a call reverberates off walls to create something familiar but new.”

Among the tracks

The music video for ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ was uploaded to the HYBE LABELS channel on the day of release. Clash wrote that the song “is sonically soft and emotionally unresolved”, and reported that the video features the actress Shin Se-kyung and was shot in Singapore. NME’s Daly wrote that “on the glistening melancholy of all-English lead single ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’, he nails the pain and ambivalence of a relationship falling apart, while the people in it struggle to let go of each other”.

Of ‘Nothing Without Your Love’, Clash wrote that it “may be the strongest track on the album”, and that it is “built around sweeping orchestral strings and anchored by a steady Brit rock undercurrent, it feels both expansive and tightly composed”. Of ‘Loser’, with YENA, the same review says it “throws itself into pop-punk mode — and makes for a fun few minutes”.

Clash wrote that ‘With the Clouds’ “feels like a romance soundtrack — gentle, dreamy, and framed by a sense of quiet optimism”, and of the closing ‘To Me, Today’ that it “closes the album with a gradual build from reflective to energetic”.

What came after

Jin’s first solo record, Happy, came out on 15 November 2024, and one of its songs was released on its own as Falling on 26 November 2024.