When my video call with Jungkook begins, he has the look of someone roused too early from a good sleep. On camera, the youngest member of the South Korean pop group BTS is wearing a black zip-up, hood pulled over his head in a way that suggests he’d enjoy a nap—a little surprising, given his reputation among fans as an indefatigable “Energizer Bunny.” We’re less than two weeks away from the release of his first solo album, Golden, and his days are packed with dance practices, rehearsals, video shoots, interviews with overseas press. The exhausting demands of promotion aren’t new to him—he’s been with BTS for more than a decade, racking up best-selling albums, Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s, sold-out stadium concerts, and world records. But this is Jungkook’s first time releasing a full record on his own, and it happens to all be in English.
At first, Jungkook felt conflicted about this. “I was thinking, Is it okay for a Korean to not release Korean songs at all?” the 26-year-old singer told me through an interpreter, from his entertainment company’s office in Seoul. BTS achieved global popularity while making music almost entirely in their native language, with the exception of a few English-language hits such as “Dynamite” and “Butter.” At the same time, the whole point of his solo effort was to challenge himself—and exclusively singing in English seemed like one good way to do that. Yet he hopes to connect with people on a level deeper than language. “When you think about pop stars, they’re these really cool singers that you’d look up to since your childhood,” he said. “Of course, things have been changing a lot. But I still have that pop-star image stuck in my head since my childhood. And I want to be a cool guy that gives off that amazing vibe.”
It’s a disarmingly simple description of a pop star: a cool person who gives off an amazing vibe. But it’s an image he’s been chasing for a long time. As a teenager, Jungkook decided to join BTS because he was so impressed by the English-speaking and rap skills of the group’s leader, RM. He used to upload covers of his favorite pop songs on SoundCloud, and regularly gushes about the likes of Justin Bieber, Usher, and Ariana Grande. The first time I saw him perform live, he flew through a stadium, suspended by a cable over tens of thousands of fans, his vocals so stable you’d think he was reclining on a chaise.
But underpinning this desire for coolness is an equally old obsession with excellence. The title of Golden immediately evokes Jungkook’s best-known nickname: the golden maknae. Coined by RM, it refers to his status as the youngest (“maknae,” in Korean) member, who seems to be preternaturally talented at everything he does. Not only is Jungkook a powerful dancer and a strong vocalist, but he also excels at drawing, painting, songwriting, archery, wrestling, sprinting, swimming—a compilation of him simply being good at stuff has more than 18 million views on YouTube. When it comes to his main job as a performer, he’s a known perfectionist who is exacting about his work. So expectations have been high for Golden, the release of which was preceded by two singles, the U.K. garage track “Seven (feat. Latto),” which set a Spotify record for the fastest song to reach 1 billion streams, and the early-2000s throwback “3D (feat. Jack Harlow).” But I wasn’t prepared for the stunning main track, “Standing Next to You,” which brings to mind Parliament-Funkadelic and Michael Jackson. It’s not quite like any song that Jungkook or BTS have done before.
Jungkook said he loved the demo for “Standing Next to You” so much that he recorded a full track the next day. One trade-off he made in order to experiment with different shades of pop while singing in English was enlisting professional songwriters and producers. Golden features the producers Andrew Watt and Cirkut, who worked on “Standing Next to You,” as well as Major Lazer, Ed Sheeran, and David Stewart. The album’s 11 songs sound like a broad survey of what you’d hear on American radio—trendy R&B, acoustic, synth-pop earworms with sing-along hooks—but transformed by Jungkook’s buttery, versatile vocals.
He told me that, for a long time, he thought it was important for artists to write their own records (as some BTS members elected to do for their solo albums). Jungkook has written and produced songs for BTS, including quiet ballads and electropop anthems; at least two tracks that he wrote for his solo project ended up being recorded by the group instead. “As I grew up, I came to terms with reality and started accepting what I’m not good at or what I don’t have to do,” he said. “At this moment, there’s nothing I want to write about. So I was thinking, Do I really need to invest my time into creating a song from the beginning to the end?” With Golden, the urgent desire wasn’t there, and the timing didn’t make sense. (BTS is expected to reunite in 2025, after all of the members have completed their mandatory military service; Jungkook has yet to begin his.) Rather than writing lyrics or composing melodies, he chose to experiment with new vocal techniques and hone his live-performance skills.
The songs on “Golden” reference mature themes—namely, substances and sex—more explicitly than his previous work, in part because of the relative cultural conservatism of his home country and the idol industry. Jungkook has openly acknowledged this shift (and seemed unbothered by the more pearl-clutching reactions) but says he’s not trying to redefine himself in relation to his past. “Jungkook back then was Jungkook back then, and somehow, I became who I am right now. The one that’s making all the judgment calls is me, myself, in this very moment,” he said. “I’m not thinking, Oh, I should break away from that cute image as the youngest member ... Lyrics are just lyrics, and images are images.” He added that he chose love songs for their universality, but that people shouldn’t read them as autobiographical.
Throughout our conversation, Jungkook would do things that might read as typically maknae to those fans who’ve followed him for years: drinking his water by lifting the cup with both tattooed, sweater-pawed hands; waving goodbye for a solid 15 seconds with a giant smile on his face, again with both hands. But the way he talks—how he visibly works through a tricky question as he’s speaking, correcting himself or jumping in to add a thought—and his poised manner offer clear signs of creative intentionality and hard-won maturity. Those signs come through in the album too: in his natural-sounding enunciation, the way he slips between a fluttery falsetto and a warm lower register on “Closer to You” or plays with volume and tone on “Hate You.” It’s the sort of growth you see in someone who hasn’t stopped running.