VIBE (feat. Jimin of BTS)

The song

‘VIBE (feat. Jimin of BTS)’ is a single Taeyang released on 13 January 2023 through THEBLACKLABEL, with Jimin of BTS featuring. The album introduction states that it was his first solo release in six years; the record before it was WHITE NIGHT, from 2017. Three months later the song was carried again as the pre-release on his second mini album, Down to Earth.

Reviews

IZM’s Park Soo-jin reviewed the single in the month it appeared. She opened on the gap it closes: singles under the BIGBANG name had been arriving every two or three years while his own releases had been comparatively few, so an appearance after this long was a welcome one. Of the song she wrote that the care taken over it is plain in places, and that with Jimin of BTS brought in to feature and sound stacked densely beneath a melody that sits easily in the ear, the song has a clear shape from beginning to end. On the arrangement she wrote that there is no slack anywhere in its three-odd minutes, down to the late point where an electric guitar comes in and takes the weight off. Her review sets the track beside the hits he has released under his own name as a single that settles among them without strain, and closes by saying that he has come back smoothly, following exactly the image the public wants and remembers of him.

Billboard came to the song from the other side, in its year-end list of 29 December 2023, where the entry on Down to Earth calls it “the R&B-tinged lead single”.

Numbers

The same Billboard entry records that the song “earned both artists their first Hot 100 entry when it entered at No. 76 this year”.