Eric Nam and The Rose’s Dueling Perspectives
On a dual track to artisitc freedom, Eric Nam and The Rose release two imaginative new albums.
In 2019, three years before he would leave the K-Pop industry to focus on the North American market, Eric Nam released “Before We Begin”. The album was his first that was written entirely in English and conceptually reflected a goal that Eric had been meticulously working for since his debut in Korea. “The goal,” he said on his podcast “Daebak Show”, “was always to reverse engineer it back to the States.”
That year, Eric began to make more intentional moves to separate himself from the uniformity of K-Pop. “Before We Begin” was not a full portrait of Eric, but it was the most hands-on he’d been on a project. He also set up Dive Studios, a podcast and production company, with his brothers. On his own show, “Daebak Show”, he interviewed other idols with a candor that is still not fully duplicated elsewhere. But what he did best was tell us more about himself. We learned about his youth in Atlanta and how he felt he never fit in in Korea or the States. Throughout all of this, he became political too, consistently pushing for representation of Asian Americans in the media. This gained him millions of new fans, and when he finally returned to the States in 2022 as an independent artist, the majority of his tour sold out.
Elsewhere, on a dual track of liberation was The Rose, an alternative rock group based in South Korea, who left their K-Pop company in 2020. The group cited “lack of payment, breakdown of trust, and violation of exclusive contract” in their termination request. As the future of the group was sorted out in litigation, members Hajoon, Dojoon and Jaehyeong enlisted in the military. Woosung, the only remaining member not in the military, focused on a solo career. He released “Genre” and “MOTH”, two mature EPs that took their cues from indie rock. When The Rose returned to music in late 2022, they released “HEAL”, one of my favorite albums of the year.
At times, Eric and Woosung crossed paths, such as on “Daebak Show”. But I had never considered just how intersected their career trajectories are until this year when their albums - “DUAL” for The Rose and “House on a Hill” for Eric - were released just weeks apart. Both works are ambitious in scope. On both albums, a concerted effort is made to push the artistry and attempt to go, at varying lengths of success, below surface.
The problems posed in these works are existential too: Is success strictly financial and materialistic, or is it something murkier, and harder to define? Both Eric and the members of The Rose are in their thirties, but their careers have just begun to twist into something that they couldn’t have pictured in their youths.
For Eric, “House on a Hill” came from a legitimate existential crisis after finding a gigantic house on a hill he wanted to buy. “I was starting to think, ‘Well, what's on my mind lately? Oh, I want to buy a house. And I want to be happier,’” he told GRAMMY. The result is a concept album that focuses on the pursuit of happiness, but maybe more messily, about when the troubles began because life didn’t go quite how you expected.
“DUAL”, it could be argued, had been in The Rose’s system for years before they wrote this album. “I think our music always did showcase both sides,” the group’s leader Sammy told Samantha Lui for GRAMMY a few weeks before the album’s release. “Whenever we wrote an album, I feel like we always had a dawn and a dusk side. We wanted to showcase that we are capable of both and this is where our music is headed.”
“DUAL” is the wilier, more ambitious album. It’s not just in the concept, which The Rose go to great lengths to portray, but in how hard they work to experiment with their sound. “You’re Beautiful”, the album’s opener, is likely the most quintessential Rose track but by track four, “Back To Me” the guys are shredding the music up.This single is one of the natural standouts that exploded live when Sam and I saw them at Lollapalooza. But it’s also a rare song that captures the group’s intensity on record, too.
Though the album is divided into two parts, DUSK and DAWN, the duality is intertwined on each side. At times this kind of jostling feels jarring, particularly in the album’s pacing. But if you’ve listened to The Rose for the past few years, this won’t come as a surprise to you. The Rose have never been content to play it safe, preferring to mix wide-eyed vulnerability with sharp-tongued edginess.
The hard rock elements of this album won’t come as a surprise to Black Roses. Where the music is unexpected is when the band embraces pop aesthetics. On “Nauseous”, Woosung’s voice sounds like a kid on a playground as he calls an ex a liar and tells her, “You’re giving me a tummy ache.”
The Rose push themselves the hardest on “Cosmos”, a song that is the most left field on the album. “Maybe we are the center of this universe,” Dojoon sings over an EDM production of synths that sound straight from an Ibiza dance floor. It’s interesting to imagine where The Rose could go from here, freed from categorization or genre. It’s even more interesting to hear a group unafraid of messing up or trying the wrong thing.
Conversely, Eric is striving for perfection on “House on a Hill”, an album that is calculated for the widest possible reach. But a few weeks ago, the album’s promotional campaign was thrown into turmoil after the singer liked an Instagram post about the war between Israel and Palestine. Eric did not address the reason he liked the post, which many fans read as pro-Israel, for weeks which provoked an intense backlash. His neutral response was disappointing to fans as Eric has gone to great lengths to not offend, well, anyone over the course of his career and threatened to distract from the album.
Yet, if you were to judge from his lyrics, it’s perhaps this need to please that is causing problems for Eric. This creeping anxiety seeps out in “I Wish I Wasn’t Me”, his most direct song about his struggle with self-worth. “The monsters knock and I let them in,” he sings on the track as it builds to an emotional punch. “Fear and doubt are my closest friends.” But at times, the vulnerability Eric brought to his Mindset series, which likely inspired this album, feels more personal than these lyrics.
When Eric experiments sonically, though, the results are the album’s best. On the quiet, pulsating “Only For a Moment” Eric wonders what life would be like with a woman he just met. His curious and hopeful voice has never sounded this romantic. “This crazy energy inside of me/ wants me to settle down with you,” he admits. On “Sink or Swim”, a stand-out B-side, he sounds lost in the night; looking for answers and questioning whether he should give in to his desires. It’s these tensions that make the album worthwhile.
What is keeping Eric up at night? I found myself wondering that throughout “House on a Hill”. At 35 years-old, Eric and I are only a year apart, so sometimes I hear my own second-guessing in his music: Are we doing this right? Will this all be worth it if we don’t achieve what we have fought so hard for?
Listening to “House on a Hill” the last few weeks, I’ve spent time thinking about how Eric tried to move every possible barrier to succeed in North America. “I still think there’s space for that Asian American story to be told,” he told Billboard in 2019. “Nobody’s filled it yet, and I don’t know if I will but I’d love to try and I’d love to build to it and hopefully it works out, you know?”
It’s these dueling perspectives of one singer striving for perfection and one group not giving a damn that brings these albums together in conversation. At the end of “House on a Hill”, Eric finds that it’s love he’s been searching for, not a mansion that showcases his wealth. Love, he feels, is worth “putting it all on the line” even if things crash. But The Rose aren’t interested in settling up yet. They’re still curious about what’s to come. On “Wonder”, they ask who’s going to lead the way now that we’re all adults here. They ask, “Do you think there’s still a chance?” For the moment, they’re content to let the question linger. Time will tell.
