ETERNAL

The record

ETERNAL is Taemin’s fifth mini album, released on 19 August 2024 with seven tracks and two title tracks, ‘Sexy In The Air’ and ‘Horizon’. It is his first solo record since Guilty, ten months earlier.

The album introduction by BIGPLANETMADE, carried on Bugs, says this is the first record Taemin produced himself, taking part in the whole process from planning to the music video, and that it carries the sense that wherever he is and whatever he does, Taemin is Taemin. The ‘Sexy In The Air’ music video went up on the BPM Entertainment channel on the day of release.

Reviews

IZM’s Yeom Dong-gyo, reviewing the record on 7 December 2024, wrote that, unlike the record before it, this one has Taemin’s writing credit on every track. He set out the span the songs open as a wide one, running from ‘Horizon’, which joins a rhythm track with a sense of speed to layer upon layer of synthesiser, to ‘The unknown sea’, which he read as impassioned and contemplative at once, in the manner of a song by the Korean band Panic. Of the work that runs from the cover art through the still images to the music video he wrote that “coming from the musician who stood closest to the industry and the business, the attempt and the experiment are welcome and surprising”, and of the ten years of solo work: “A discography that has taken both quality and quantity, with three full-length albums of distinct colour and EPs filling the gaps between them, is full of sharp and inventive moments.”

IZM’s Kim Tae-hun reviewed the title track ‘Sexy In The Air’ on 27 August 2024. He wrote that the song “keeps intact the identity Taemin has built up steadily, from ‘Danger’ through ‘Move’ to ‘Guilty’”, and that “the construction, which breaks the standard flow and turns into drill, is a variation carrying the wish to show more freely and the image of transformation”. He added: “Of course, the attempt to show a new side without leaving the existing image behind is meaningful in itself.”

Among the tracks

‘Deja Vu’ is the track Dazed carried in its 50 best K-pop tracks of 2024, published on 13 December 2024. Taylor Glasby’s entry sets the two songs side by side: “Where lead single ‘Sexy In The Air’ was vibey, suggestive, and sweaty, B-side ‘Deja Vu’ is its poignant contrast.” The entry goes on: “Here he is a man sliding across dimensions, staring through the darkness at flickering versions of himself, and thus Taemin makes ‘Deja Vu’ beautiful and floating, almost ethereal with strings and falsetto yet pulsing with unease, the slow, thick bass pulling him further into the blackness of space.”

IZM’s Yeom Dong-gyo read ‘Horizon’ as a rhythm track driven over layered synthesisers and ‘The Unknown Sea’ as impassioned and contemplative at once. Of the opening track ‘G.O.A.T’ he wrote that it is a hip-hop number summoning 1990s boom bap.

What happened

The record reached Dazed’s 2024 year-end page through ‘Deja Vu’. Dazed does not number the entries there. IZM ran an album review and a separate single review of the title track, and the album review appeared on 7 December, three and a half months after release.

The next release was the special digital single Veil, a year and a month later on 13 September 2025.