Happy

The record

Happy is a mini album Jin released on 15 November 2024, with six tracks and ‘Running Wild’ as the title track. Wendy joins him on ‘Heart on the Window’. The album introduction on Bugs calls it his first solo album, says it takes happiness as its subject and holds several styles built on band sound, and says ‘I’ll Be There’ came out as a pre-release on 25 October that year.

The label prints English titles for two of the songs in its own distribution metadata: ‘네게 닿을 때까지’ is Falling and ‘그리움에’ is I will come to you. The English-language press took both up under those names.

Reviews

NME’s Rhian Daly gave the record four stars out of five on the day of release. She wrote that “over the six tracks that make up the record, he creates a bubble of positivity, filling it up with brightness and levity while acknowledging the shadows and struggles that allow that cheerful spirit to shine harder when it finds you”, and that “at its core, ‘Happy’ is a record of encouragement — one that promises you can reach that emotional state and finds pleasure in the small moments in life”. Her review closes on the listening: “It’s a record that softly envelopes you in feelings of cheerfulness, kicking the worries of the world aside for just under 20 minutes, Jin effortlessly taking on the role of conductor of joy.”

Rolling Stone’s Maura Johnston reviewed it the same day. She wrote that “Happy opens with ‘Running Wild,’ a peppy cut that sounds tailor-made for convertible rides, or at least movie montages featuring them”, and that the song “was co-produced by Gary Barlow of the British boy-band sensation Take That — a neat squaring of the pop-idol circle that could help explain why its bubbly urgency fits Jin’s overall demeanor like a glove”.

Billboard placed the record 23rd on its 25 best K-pop albums of 2024. The entry, signed Andrew Unterberger, calls it “an impressively realized pop-rock debut” and says that “the open-road singalong ‘Running Wild’ sounds like a lost banger from The Killers’ classic period, while ‘I’ll Be There’ could have been a Fitz and the Tantrums favorite 15 years earlier”.

Among the tracks

The music video for ‘Running Wild’ was uploaded to the HYBE LABELS channel on the day of release. NME’s Daly introduced the song as “the faintly Christmassy opening song co-produced and co-written by Take That’s Gary Barlow” and wrote that it “has visions of a return to giddy times”.

‘I’ll Be There’, the pre-release, is the one song here a Korean outlet reviewed on its own. IZM’s Kim Tae-hun wrote on 6 November 2024 that it is “a cheer song only Jin could make, filled with nothing but a feeling of happiness”. He wrote that “there are points that are easy to sing along to, and no difficult or dull stretch anywhere, and a clean sense of release comes through in the delivery riding that cheerful rockabilly sound”, and closed: “Sometimes a plain, unangular finish like this turns out to be the very best there is.”

Of ‘Heart on the Window’ with Wendy, Daly wrote that “the latter — a collaboration with Red Velvet’s Wendy and Jin’s first duet — is the lowkey highlight of the album”. Johnston called it “a sweetly romantic offering that splits the difference between winsome dreampop and heart-pounding anthem”, and wrote in the same sentence that the vocalist and guitarist of ONE OK ROCK bolster Falling. Of the closing ‘I will come to you’, Daly wrote that it “closes things out with an earnest piano ballad dedicated to ARMY that captures its creator’s feelings around being separated from his fans”.

Numbers

Billboard wrote that 2024 held a moment when three K-pop acts — BTS’s Jin, ENHYPEN and ATEEZ — ranked in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 at the same time.

What came after

Jin’s solo release before this record was The Astronaut of 28 October 2022, and the second mini album, Echo, followed on 16 May 2025.