Taemin and jimin

“On that vague border between good and bad / You played the fool for me,”Taemin whispers on his newest single, ‘Guilty’. In the music video, faceless hands grab his neck, rearrange his body, control him in a suffocating atmosphere. But don’t be mistaken – he’s the one playing here. It’s his own hand who snakes underneath his shirt, shutting him up as he proclaims, “You got me G-U-I-L-T-Y.”

To fully understand Taemin, you need to see the artist as art itself. He is his own concept, even a “Taemin-cliche”, as he puts it. He enraptures the senses, beguiles the listener into his twisted world, only for them to find out that he’s been talking to himself the whole time. His releases are layered in metaphors and double-entendres, and his concepts often dive into humanity’s deepest questions, unafraid to explore their contradictions.

“A lot of my songs carry words that could be considered negative,” he tells NME through Zoom, a few days before the release of his fourth mini-album, ‘Guil

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