RISETaeyang's second album, released on 3 June 2014 with nine tracks led by 'Eyes, Nose, Lips'. It came four years after Solar.
RISE is Taeyang’s second album, released on 3 June 2014 with nine tracks. The title track is ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’, and the running order carries ‘Stay With Me’ with G-Dragon and the earlier single RINGA LINGA, out in November 2013. YG Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs describes it as a record that arrived four years after the first album Solar.
IZM’s Kim Ban-ya wrote in June 2014 that “all nine songs on the new album are cut finely, with a large sense of space and a shine to them”. She wrote that “because the melody stands as the frame, there are many songs that push the vocal and the instruments to their limit”, and read the placing of ‘Body’ and ‘Ringa Linga’ in the middle of the record as a change of air.
Oi, writing for the hip-hop and R&B outlet Rhythmer on 10 June, wrote that “this album, full of pop colour and out from under the impression of an R&B star, also stands aside from the trend”, and that “the overall impression of the album is different enough from what came before to count as a musical turning point in his career”. The same piece notes that Taeyang took a far more active part in the work on this record, four years on.
Idology, a K-pop criticism webzine, ran two writers on the album in the early-June 2014 issue of 1st Listen, its short-notice column on new releases. Kim Young-dae wrote that “taken as music on its own, ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’ is a title song with nothing to apologise for”, and that “the album as a whole feels rather grave, and leaves the strong impression of a work with musical ambition rather than one offering a trend to be used up lightly”. Yoo Je-sang wrote that the mood of the songs is consistent and that only one track, ‘Ringa Linga’, is carried over from an earlier single, and called it an album that shows faithfully what the public expects of Taeyang.
Billboard’s Jeff Benjamin placed the record at number six in his list of the year’s ten best K-pop albums on 11 December 2014. He called it “the shining example of how to make a good R&B album today”, and wrote that in place of elaborately flamboyant moments the record leans on vocal performance in ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’ and ‘Let Go’ and on strong melodies in ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘Love You to Death’, with a few tracks — ‘Body’ and ‘Ringa Linga’ — left open for experimentation. The same piece says that in the United States the album broke the record for the highest-charting album by a solo K-pop act.
‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’ is the song this record was written about most. Idology opened a Draft column for it alone four days after release, and Kim Young-dae wrote there that “when the ringing, fine-grained voice is projected onto ‘eyes, nose, lips’ as a symbol of longing that is hackneyed and yet final, it cuts ten times deeper than any ordinary minor-key ballad”. He also wrote that the piano-led progression and the use of falsetto closely resemble Ryan Tedder’s way of writing a song.
Ju Min-hyuk, writing for the webzine weiv on 20 June, wrote that “the song is not complicated in its construction, and the instrumentation is very plain. The use of effects is kept to a minimum. In the middle of that, only the vocal shines like a sun.” He added that “if it were sung in English, it would not be at all out of place as a song high on the Billboard chart. It is that polished an R&B song.”
The Korean Music Awards named the song best R&B and soul song at its twelfth ceremony, in 2015. The selector Han Dong-yoon wrote that “the piano, quiet but spreading a thick lyricism, and the sorrow made by the hollow-ringing rhythm that enters from the second verse, were the decisive move of ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’”, and closed the note with a sentence: “It is a model of writing that takes Korean feeling and Korean experience into account.”
‘1AM’ was taken up on 10 July 2014 by The Singles Jukebox, the column where British and American writers each file a short note of their own on one single. Megan Harrington wrote: “Taeyang is clever; ‘1 AM’ spins from intense melancholy to carefree joyrides and back.” Brad Shoup wrote that “the piano-and-twinkle intro got me set for some sellout-Springsteen-level bombast, but things level out for Taeyang’s obsessive, thoroughly bummed reading”, and called the song “a perfect match for one grand weep of a production job”.
IZM’s Kim Ban-ya picked out two more. She wrote that “‘Stay with me’, with G-Dragon, builds a thick wall of chorus in its second half and gives even a thrilling sense of release”, and that “‘Let Go’ draws a clear line between itself and the gospel songs that came before, with a chic vocal”.
Circle Chart put all nine songs from the album on its digital chart for week 23 of 2014 (1 to 7 June), the week of release. ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’ was at number one, ‘Stay With Me’ at seven and ‘1AM’ at 11, with ‘This Ain’t It’ at 19, ‘Body’ at 20, ‘Let Go’ at 21 and ‘Love You To Death’ at 22 behind them. The album was at number one on the album chart for week 24 (8 to 14 June).
IZM named ‘Eyes, Nose, Lips’ one of its Korean singles of the year in December 2014. Kim Do-heon wrote in that entry that “through a slow R&B that held his many gifts in reserve for a moment, Taeyang drew out the most striking signature single since ‘Only Look At Me’”, and that “a new song for the whole country to sing had been born”.
Claims in this story link to official or primary sources.
Taeyang has released five albums under his own name between 2008 and 2026. The first was the mini album Hot; four full-length albums followed — Solar, RISE, WHITE NIGHT and QUINTESSENCE. Here are the five in order, with their release dates, formats and what the reporting of the day recorded.
