Long Way Home

The song

‘Long Way Home’ is the single Taemin released on 27 March 2026. It is his first release since the special digital single Veil six months earlier, and it came sixteen days after he moved agency.

The album introduction by Galaxy Corporation, carried on Bugs, says the song is Taemin’s first English digital single, and describes it as a pop and R&B ballad about trying to hold on to a moment as it disappears. There is no official music video.

Reviews

IZM’s Kim Ho-hyun, reviewing the single on 10 April 2026, set out the lineage the song stands on: “The smooth melody brings Justin Timberlake’s R&B pop to mind, and in an arrangement that emphasises a rhythm sticking close to the skin, Usher passes by for a moment.”

The same review set out where the song sits: “The conditions — a first release after moving agency, and a point just before a solo stage at Coachella — naturally add to the anticipation.”

What happened

Hankook Ilbo (한국일보) reported on 11 March 2026 that Taemin had signed with Galaxy Corporation. The same article noted that he had ended his contract with SM Entertainment in March 2024 and had been with Big Planet Made Entertainment in between, and that he was due on the Coachella stage in Indio, California, on 11 and 18 April.

The stage Kim Ho-hyun described as upcoming took place on 11 April. Sports Khan (스포츠경향) reported that Taemin took the Mojave Stage at 7.30 pm local time for a roughly fifty-minute set of his own, and that this was the first time a Korean male solo singer had been on the official Coachella line-up with a stage of his own. The same report said six new songs were played there for the first time.

Afterwards

Two months later, on 22 May, came the single PERMISSION, and on 31 August the mini album PHASE 1 : Soft Violence. The six songs Sports Khan listed as first played at Coachella — ‘Permission’, ‘PARASITE’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Let Me Be The One’, ‘Sober’ and ‘1004’ — are all carried on that mini album.