BTS Star Jin Surprises By Announcing A New Album, Months After His First Arrived
BTS singer Jin has a new release on the way, and it's arriving sooner than most fans probably expected – especially considering there hadn't been hints about a new era, and it hasn't been long since he last gave his following music under his own name.
The K-pop superstar has officially announced Echo, his next solo project. While many details are still being kept under wraps, including how long the release will be, as the word 'album' means different things in the Western markets, when compared to how it is used in South Korea. No song titles or singles have been shared yet, either, though they likely will be fairly soon.
Echo will be Jin's second solo collection, following Happy, which dropped in November. That effort arrived with much fanfare and made an impressive commercial impact. Happy debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, making him one of a growing number of K-pop soloists to hit the highest tier on the most important albums ranking in America. The set produced just one Hot 100 hit, 'Running Wild,' which peaked at No. 53.
Echo is scheduled to be released on May 16, which means it will hit store shelves and streaming platforms less than six months after Happy. That kind of quick turnaround is relatively uncommon in the K-pop space when it comes to soloists, and that timeline makes the announcement that much more shocking.
BTS remains on hiatus, as several of the band's seven members are currently completing their mandatory military enlistment in South Korea. Others, meanwhile, have turned their attention to solo endeavors, like J-Hope, who has dropped several tunes throughout 2025.
With Echo, Jin will soon become the fifth BTS member to deliver multiple solo projects. He'll join the ranks of Suga, J-Hope, RM, and Jimin with at least two efforts under his own moniker. That leaves just two other bandmates — Jung Kook and V — who've only put out one collection apiece, at least so far.
Jin hit No. 1 on Billboard's World Digital Song Sales chart in February, but it's unlikely that the tune will be featured on Echo. 'Close to You" served as a soundtrack cut from he Korean television series When the Stars Gossip.
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You could do whatever you wanted, not unlike comedy, but with more production, especially when it was all just audio. And I think at the beginning, there was a sort of movement where it was kind of populous in that everyone thought they could do it. And it's the same with comedy now. And now, a lot of people do it for a lot of different reasons. Some people are doing it just because their brand will enable them to have another cash flow, by capitalizing on who they are, whether they're good at it or not. But ultimately, it's created a lot of yammering and once everyone went to video and once old school mainstream show business started to collapse in on itself, people were really able through bubbles and tribalization, able to build their own show business empires. And I think podcasting facilitated that and that is good. I think that in another way, podcasting helped people get their voices out there and niche markets and really do interesting stuff, but also lowered the bar for entertainment in general. I think that you have as much, if not more, unique and interesting content with interesting personalities and talent, but then you have a much larger portion of two to three white guys sitting in front of microphones talking about the last time they sh** their pants as adults. So you have this large contingency of like afternoon drive time radio that seems to speak to a lot of it, which I think lowers the bar and then you do have other stuff, but I think it opened the doors to people having more control of the type of show business they wanted to do. And I think it brought a lot of people that may not have thought that they had a profound amount of talent, but at the very least could sit and talk to other people. I can't tell you whether it's good or bad. There's a lot both and probably more bad than good. So then what do you say to that young comic who comes up to you and wants to start a podcast? What advice do you give them? Well, that timing is great. And that you're going to be up against a lot. I am too old to know what it really takes, and I've never been a guy who produces content for content's sake. We live in sort of a post-publicity world, in terms of other ways of tried-and-true ways of getting you and your being and brand out there. And it's all on you. So if you're going to do it, it seems that I wouldn't want to do it now. To what you have to do to sort of surface is a full-time job you have before you even get to the podcast. In terms of social media, in terms of creating content that grabs people enough to bring them to you. And I think what we lose in that, again, is lowering the bar of what these art forms were or what these broadcast forms were, because of this need, this desperate need to somehow grab people's attention and hold it for long enough, to keep it for a long enough for you to turn a buck out of it. So I would say go ahead, I guess, do what you can, but it's not the world I grew up in. And it's not the world where people spend a lot of time trying to create interesting and provocative content or sort of hyper-personalized and well-articulated, comedic voices. I mean, everyone's chasing whatever their freedom of speech may be. It's all now kind of boxed in by social media platform expectations. So how free are you? What are you doing there?
