BTS' Jin puts all romantic cliches to shame in Echo: A profound and emotionally layered album

Jin’s lyrical power lies in his exploration of love of all kinds. Soulful, melancholic, fragile, even broken, he wraps emotion in soaring highs that feel distinctly his.  Sometimes heavy, sometimes comforting, light and breezy, there’s always a day for a Jin song.

While every BTS member has charted a path for themselves, some taking the introspective route, others healing from a haunting past, Jin plays with the varying hues of love and emotion. Epiphany, showed his introspection on self-love. In Astronaut, his real love letter to fans before his military enlistment, he hit the high notes with the words ‘I love you’, followed by reverberating  instrumentals. It’s strange, what he can do with the simplest of words, ensuring that they don’t seem cliched.

And then came Happy, filled with different tinges of love. Wistful, hopeful, and sometimes, quiet angst. The most resonant being Heart on The Window, where again, he turns the cheesiest line into a dedication of love. Now, we have Echo, his latest, where the singer has experimented further with his style—sometimes daring to go a step ahead, sometimes preferring to stay in the safer realms. The album looks at romance in all its phases—yearning, fragility, loss, grief—until love fades into the background of memory.

The most publicised song of the lot was Don’t Say You Love Me—while that toys with the idea of a couple on the verge of breaking up, but can’t quite let go—it’s enjoyable to listen to, but doesn’t quite have the Jin magic that his other songs do—not quite the one where you might want to keep replaying obsessively. 

But that’s alright, Jin mixes it up well welcomes the country touch with Rope It, which begins with a horse neighing. Following this, we’re treated to the fun of guitar twangs and harmonica. This is his cowboy era, and Jin owns it with full cowboy swagger. You can hear the fun he is having with it. 

The real gem is Loser, which follows the sassy, biting conversation between a couple—fast-paced, with a metallic bite. He returns to his roots with  Nothing without Your Love, with a Jin-like flourish, he examines the identity crisis that one faces after a breakup. He keeps asking, ‘Who am I without their love?’ Yet it isn’t maudlin or overtly ridden with anguish, it shows an existential crisis, that’s just easier on the ears. In  A Journey with Clouds, he helps us visualise a rather idyll scenario—the idea of a perfect companion; someone who ticks all the boxes.