HotTaeyang's first solo mini album, released on 22 May 2008 with six tracks led by 'Only Look At Me'. It was the first solo record by a BIGBANG member.
Hot is Taeyang’s first solo mini album, released on 22 May 2008 with six tracks. The title track is ‘Only Look At Me’, and the record carries ‘Prayer’ featuring Teddy and ‘Make Love’ featuring Kush. YG Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs presents it as the first solo album by BIGBANG’s main vocalist.
IZM’s Ryu Seok-hyun, writing in June 2008, opened his notice with a single line: “The sound stretches out cleanly.” He wrote that “Taeyang takes in the current of the moment and shows an outstanding wit in digesting it into a style of his own”, and that “the processed vocal on ‘Intro_Hot’ brings Akon to mind at once, and the title song ‘Only Look At Me’ digests urban sound so well that it can be mistaken for a Timbaland-style production with Ne-Yo’s voice on it”.
The Korean Music Awards named the record best R&B and soul album at its sixth ceremony, in 2009. The selector Kim Bong-hyun wrote in the selection note: “In a word, the virtue of this work is ‘an excellent reproduction of mainstream American R&B’.” He gave as his reason that this is a reproduction built on real understanding rather than a surface imitation, wrote that “‘Only Look At Me’, which brushes past the names of Timbaland and Omarion while mixing in a curiously Korean feeling, is the representative example”, and closed with a sentence: “With this one album Taeyang proved his effort and his will towards Black music.”
‘Only Look At Me’ is the title track, written by Teddy. Ryu Seok-hyun covered it on its own around release, and wrote that “the title song is striking for a drum line that recalls Timbaland and for its varied melodic lines” and that “the vocal suits the music very well, enough that Ne-Yo comes to mind the moment the song starts”.
The same song was named best R&B and soul song at that sixth Korean Music Awards. The selector Lee Ho-young wrote that “the real reason this song stands out is that the polished flow you can feel in mainstream American R&B is blended, in the right measure, with the plot Korean pop has plainly been working with all along — and which the public’s ear therefore knows”. He summed the song up as “a song faithful, without error, to a clear goal set as ‘trendy’ and to a target called the public”.
IZM put ‘Only Look At Me’ among its singles of the year on 31 December 2008. The entry reads: “A trim arrangement that absorbed the trends of contemporary R&B, and lyrics on a ‘bad man’ concept with an appeal that is hard to refuse, were enough to win the sympathy of many young listeners and to make them look only at Taeyang.”
At the sixth Korean Music Awards the following year, the record and its title track took the album and the song prize in the R&B and soul category together.
The mini album returned to the chart two years later. In July 2010, the week the first album Solar came out, Circle Chart placed it at number 33 on the album chart for week 27 (27 June to 3 July) and at number 60 for week 28 (4 to 10 July).
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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.
