Fan Chant: Pregaming for RM’s New Album Right Place, Wrong Person
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Welcome back to Fan Chant, a weekly column for K-pop fans, stans, and newbies alike. This week, we prepare for the new solo project from RM of BTS. As always, if you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe to my companion newsletter to get Fan Chant delivered right to your inbox each week!
When RM released his solo album, Indigo, in December of 2022, there was so much to process: the stellar collaborations with folks like Erykah Badu, Anderson .Paak, and Tablo; the genre-fluid nature of the project, spanning from light pop to reflective ballads; and the depth of the lyricism from the perennially poetry-inclined songwriter. To me, one of the biggest takeaways was just how much of RM there is in BTS — his sound, perspective, and clarity tend to drip through to so many aspects of their work as a group, and his solo album encapsulates that.
Indigo has remained one of my favorite albums of the past five years. I love it so much, and it hasn’t lost any of its replay value for me since dropping in 2022. (If you read my admittedly somewhat breathless review upon release, you probably aren’t surprised to hear this.) Now, we are back in an RM release week, with his sophomore solo album Right Place, Wrong Person scheduled to arrive this Friday, May 24th.
This forthcoming LP is certain to be quite a departure from Indigo — everything that’s been teased, including collaborators and the visual elements, is a far cry from the earthy, diary-like atmosphere of his first full-length album. To be fair, Indigo was also markedly different from RM’s two EPs, RM and mono., with the former characterized by bold, frustrated rap lines, and the latter pulling back into atmospheric, melancholy, introspective territory.
For Right Place, Wrong Person, RM worked closely with some of the members of Seoul-based arts collective Balming Tiger, who he previously collaborated with on the incredibly fun “SEXY NUKIM.” For anyone who has yet to do so, it could be worth taking a listen of Balming Tiger’s 2023 debut, January Never Dies, to help calibrate expectations for Right Place, Wrong Person later this week. Those folks love to get weird.
Balming Tiger were our CoSign artists last October, and one of the things I remember most from the interview is just how many faces popped onto the Zoom call. It wasn’t until more than a dozen boxes of overlapping conversations were onscreen that creative director and RM collaborator San Yawn gave me the green light to get started, explaining, “We have a big family.”
Also in the interview, the team’s visual artist Chanhee Hong explained, “I never want to limit our visuals. Playing with a sense of space is important to me.” While the music video for RM’s pre-release single, “Come back to me,” was directed by Lee Sung Jin of Netflix’s BEEF fame, that sentiment is present in the design of dollhouse rooms to escape. It’s also a theme in the visuals being teased for the project’s focus track, “LOST!,” where RM stands in a hedge maze.
Of course, Right Place, Wrong Person isn’t a Balming Tiger album — it’s still an RM album at the end of the day. There are new collaborations to anticipate (he’ll trade bars with rapper Little Simz and welcomes Moses Sumney for a track) and presumably plenty of highly intentional lyrics to unravel. So in the meantime, give Indigo one more play from start to finish as a personal favor to me, and maybe spend some time with January Never Dies, if you feel so inclined. If I were you, I’d start here.
Song Rec of the Week:
It’s the best song on Indigo and I can’t be convinced otherwise.
Fan Chant: Pregaming for RM’s New Album Right Place, Wrong Person
Mary Siroky
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