mono.

The record

mono. is a seven-track record RM released on 23 October 2018. The album information page on Bugs gives BIGHIT MUSIC as the label and YG PLUS as the distributor, a running time of 24 minutes 49 seconds, and R&B/soul and rap/hip-hop as the genres. That page carries no album introduction, and what the label itself called the record is written four years later, in the introduction to Indigo: a mixtape released in October 2018.

The seven tracks are ‘tokyo’, ‘seoul (prod. HONNE)’, ‘moonchild’, ‘badbye (with eAeon)’, ‘uhgood’, ‘everythingoes (with Nell)’ and ‘forever rain’ — the label’s own English titles, under which the last two are delivered as ‘어긋’ and ‘지나가 (with Nell)’ in Korea. The music video for the closing ‘forever rain’ went up on the HYBE LABELS channel on 22 October 2018, the day before release.

Reviews

Billboard placed the record sixth in “The 20 Best K-pop Albums of 2018: Critics’ Picks”, published on 17 December 2018. The entry, signed with initials only, says that where RM’s first mixtape RM revelled in his many sides, here he compresses opposing ideas into homonyms on ‘seoul’. It goes on: “Travel is his mode of existence as a touring superstar, but he’s still trying to catch up to his real self.” It closes, “mono. is the abbreviation of inner worlds that aren’t bound by one meaning.”

Among the tracks

The song Billboard singles out is the second track, ‘seoul (prod. HONNE)’, produced by the British duo HONNE. The label returns to that collaboration four years later in the Indigo introduction, which notes that the same producers made ‘Closer (with Paul Blanco, Mahalia)’.

Only the closing ‘forever rain’ has a music video. eAeon appears on ‘badbye (with eAeon)’ and the band Nell on ‘everythingoes (with Nell)’.

Numbers

In the opening of the same piece Billboard writes that 10 albums by K-pop artists reached the Billboard 200 in 2018, more than three times as many as in 2017, and lists RM among the artists behind them. The sixth-place entry says that RM reached the highest position a Korean solo artist had held on the Billboard 200, without much promotional effort.

What came after

RM’s next record under his own name is Indigo, his first official solo album, released four years later on 2 December 2022, and after that came Right Place, Wrong Person in May 2024.