FACE

The record

FACE is Jimin’s first solo mini album, released on 24 March 2023 with six tracks. The title track is ‘Like Crazy’. The album introduction states that this is his first official solo album, that it holds the feelings he went through during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the title stands for facing himself; the songs move between pop, hip-hop and R&B, it adds. By the same introduction, ‘Set Me Free Pt.2’ was released a week ahead of the record, on 17 March.

Reviews

Writing on the day of release, NME’s Rhian Daly gave the record four stars out of five. “The record began life in early 2022 and finds the BTS star examining his experiences during the pandemic and diving into who he really is, confronting his true feelings rather than papering over them with a joyful facade,” she wrote, and of what the album does with sound: “Sonically, he’s done just that here, using a range of sounds and styles across the five tracks that both add new strings to his bow as an artist and craft an inky and compelling atmosphere.”

Rolling Stone’s Maura Johnston, reviewing the same day, started with the opening track. Of ‘Face-off’ she wrote that it “delves deeper into the dark side implied by that opening—it’s a high-gloss trap-pop cut that allows Jimin to lash out at people and things that ‘test’ and ‘kill’ him, with a pre-chorus that swirls into synth-pop bliss before crash-landing back into its jagged, visceral anger.”

IZM’s Jang Jun-hwan reviewed the title track, opening on the line that it is “a composition with a feel for texture”. He described its synth-pop stretch as a passage where “the luminous synthesisers and rhythm lines of the 1980s arrive in turn, and instrument upon instrument stacks up as if adrift, lifting the mood”, and wrote that the song “sets up the right conditions in many ways — as the title track of a first solo record made with a wide audience in mind, and as a statement of what marks Jimin out as a singer”.

Among the tracks

All three outlets went to the title track, ‘Like Crazy’. NME introduced it as “a crisp synth-pop song inspired by the movie of the same name” and picked out the sampled film dialogue that opens it; IZM described its arrangement in the lines above. The song sits on the record twice, in Korean as the third track and in English as the last.

Rolling Stone wrote of the fourth track that “the swirling ballad ‘Alone’ also adds tension by tweaking its sonics, using vocal effects to underscore its depictions of emotional short-circuiting”. The same review read the interlude ‘Interlude : Dive’ as glassy and dreamlike, built partly out of found sound such as the ripple of a crowd.

Numbers

On 28 December 2023 Billboard placed ‘Like Crazy’ at number two in its 25 best K-pop songs of 2023. The same piece notes that the song had entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number one.