SolarTaeyang's first album, released on 1 July 2010. The title track is 'I Need A Girl' featuring G-Dragon, and the record also collects the earlier singles 'Where U At' and 'Wedding Dress'.
Solar is Taeyang’s first album, released on 1 July 2010. The title track is ‘I Need A Girl’ featuring G-Dragon, and the running order collects the digital singles Where U At and Wedding Dress, both out the year before. YG Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs looks back at ‘Only Look At Me’ from the 2008 mini album Hot as the song that brought R&B to a wider audience for him.
The Korean Music Awards named this record best R&B and soul album at its eighth ceremony, in 2011. The selector Lee Byung-joo wrote that the album makes the most of the genre’s own appeal, and closed the note with a sentence: “This album is a finished R&B record that shows plainly, in the middle of that current, how far idol music has come as well.”
IZM has no notice on the record as a whole. What the outlet left is three single reviews, each written when one of the album’s songs first came out.
‘I Need A Girl’ is the title track, released with the album. IZM’s Cho A-reum wrote in July 2010 that “a soft, gentle sound is the point of this one”, and that “there is no push-and-pull groove to sting, but the vocal is better than expected”. The song took best R&B and soul song at the eighth Korean Music Awards the following year.
‘Wedding Dress’ came out first, as a digital single in November 2009. IZM’s Hong Hyuk-eui wrote that December that “if the ground line of the first single owed a great deal to electronica, ‘Wedding Dress’ has a slender piano melody in its place”, and that “the outside has been remodelled with some sense, but the frame inside holds to contemporary R&B”.
‘Where U At’ arrived in October 2009. IZM’s Cho Yi-seul wrote in her single notice that same month that the intro synthesiser and the polished rhythm programming leave no room for doubt that a sound style of their own had been completed.
Circle Chart placed the deluxe edition of Solar at number two on its album chart for week 27 of 2010 (27 June to 3 July), the week of release, and the standard edition at number one the following week, week 28 (4 to 10 July).
Eight songs from the album were on that week-27 digital chart. ‘I Need A Girl’ was at number seven, with ‘You’re My’ at 64, ‘Superstar’ at 65 and ‘Just A Feeling’ at 69 behind it; ‘I Need A Girl’ rose to number four in week 28. That listing also names the three titles the album’s information page withholds — ‘Move (Feat. Teddy)’, ‘Take It Slow’ and ‘니가 잠든 후에’ (Niga Jamdeun Hue).
Taeyang also took the netizens’ choice for male musician of the year at that eighth Korean Music Awards.
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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.
