On Their New Album “HARD”, SHINee Continues to Reinvent Themselves

*SHINee’s back! On “HARD” the group excels at expanding the experimental music they pioneered in K-Pop throughout the 2010s. / Image cr: SM Entertainment*

SHINee is dedicated to defying expectations on their new album “HARD”.

“HARD” is the first album the group has released since the group’s youngest member Taemin left for the military in 2021, and it’s by far their most ambitious. That comeback saw a dizzying amount of releases between a new mini-album, “Don’t Call Me”, a repackaged album named “Atlantis”, and finally, a Japanese EP titled “Superstar”. And that list doesn’t count Taemin’s own music, “Advice”, released right before he enlisted.

“We will not rest on our laurels and continue to proceed,” Key promised South China Morning Post in May, and the group delivered on this declaration. Sonically, “HARD” resembles some of SHINee’s most innovative work. The earworm melodies of “Ring Ding Dong”, the European house elements from the album “ODD”, and the wildly edgy sound of “Lucifer” are all found on this album. Newer K-Pop fans might mistake SHINee as a strictly vocal group, but the group has always chosen to push the boundaries of their genre.

As a group that was never content with playing it safe, SHINee has muscled some of their trickiest music to date on “HARD”. Throughout the album, the members even scramble what we’ve come to expect from them as performers. Minho, the group’s rapper, has never sounded stronger as a vocalist, while Taemin, whose voice has only grown more rich in age, surprised me most by opening “JUICE” by spitting bars.

Though the title track of “HARD” is an edgy choice, the most exciting track on the album is “JUICE”. Against the sounds of a demented fun house, Taemin raps, “At the top I look down/ I call victory/ When your own style is so unique/ Shining every moment.” Throughout the song, the group trades off on the line, “I think you like me” drawing out the “meee” like a playground taunt. Here “JUICE” refers to both the feelings from a crush – but also to the group’s swagger. “We know we got the juice,” they declare. “Feeling bright wherever we go.”

SHINee also leaves room for the music that they’re most loved for. “Sweet Misery” is a classic SHINee ballad that builds to an explosive chorus with gorgeous vocals provided by Onew, while “Identity” is pure pop fun. These tracks are never challenging like the title track. Instead, they’re simply products of fifteen years of hard work to create damn good harmonies.

SHINee has always been a resilient group, but this comeback has reinforced, again, their determination to forge ahead. Just weeks before the release of “HARD”, SM announced that Onew, the group’s leader and main vocalist, would not participate in the group’s activities due to “health reasons”. So, for this comeback, Key, Minho and Taemin have promoted as three.

Onew’s obsence makes this comeback feel bittersweet, but the boys have worked extraordinarily hard to sing and dance a little harder to fill the spaces left by Jonghyun and Onew [the group still explicitly states that SHINee will always be five]. It’s a testament to SHINee’s tenacity and love for the group that they’ve stepped up to the challenge without missing a beat.

It would have been easy for SHINee to phone in this album, after all. The group is celebrating fifteen years together this year, and in an era that’s seen a revival of second generation groups reclaiming their popularity in K-Pop, the success of “HARD” is almost guaranteed. But SHINee has never been one to play it safe. Their brilliance has always been how they balance an over the top concept, like zombie love in “Why So Serious”, with moments of riveting catharsis on tracks like “Selene 6.23”.

The group shares more in common with Lady Gaga, whose over-the-top concepts actually represented deeply personal, sometimes traumatic themes, than many idol groups. This is partly thanks to the work of Jonghyun, who often wrote their most emotional tracks, and to the members who advocated for the right to create their own concepts.

Since Jonghyun’s death in 2017, though, the group has worked extraordinarily hard to continue to merge the surreal with the intimately personal. Minho, who used to collaborate on tracks with Jonghyun, has continued to write songs for the group. His last songwriting credit for SHINee, 2021’s “Area”, was a career highlight for the group because of it’s haunting lyrics about loss and grief. But as they’ve healed, the members have honored Jonghyun in interviews and performances. During the most recent SHINee World concert in Seoul, Minho pointed up at the sky and smiled as he sang Jonghyun’s verse on “VIEW”.

When I listen to “HARD”, though, the song I’m most moved by is “The Feeling”, a track that strikes gold with a return to the British electronic music that redefined them in 2015. “Let’s follow these feelings cause life goes on,” Key sings in the opening verse. “Not even for a day have I stopped,” Minho continues, “Always in motion.”

“I wanna feel it!” Onew shouts as the chorus reaches its emotional peak. It’s hard to not be moved by this kind of big pop track. As someone only separated by weeks in age from Onew, I’ve grown with them from a teen boy to an adult. We’ve lost friends, had our lives ripped apart at times, pieced them back together, and still found a way to keep going. As I’ve gone through my own ups and downs in life, I’ve sometimes looked at SHINee and wondered, “How did they keep going?”

Though they were given the name SHINee because they are “the boys who receive light”, the members have never backed away from writing about darker feelings. For a while, it was Jonghyun’s lyrics that encouraged the group to go deeper, but in the last five years, each of the members have explored themes about loss, identity and the fragility of relationships.

After a few listens of “The Feeling”, I thought about one of the last interviews Jonghyun gave where he talked about his quest to overcome his depression. He wanted to feel everything, but simultaneously not be consumed by sadness.

“You might be able to go through the early-to-mid-part of your life with that kind of melancholy. But if you want to grow, you can only survive if you throw those feelings away,” he told Esquire. “Unless you want to get trapped within yourself and die, you have to grow no matter how much it hurts — but if you stop because you’re afraid, in the end it’s inevitable that you’d remain in an immature state of mind. I chose the path to transform myself. To reveal myself to the public. To attempt to make my thoughts understood.”

“The Feeling” charts SHINee’s growth from being adolescents to young men who want to authentically express themselves. In the music video, Shawols quickly noted that Minho’s map contains clues to all five of their solo albums. When life gets difficult, the message seems to say, return to the comfort of your closest friends. “I know that we’ll always make blunders,” Minho sings in the sing’s second verse. “Nothing’s guaranteed in the end.” But at least they have each other.

These kinds of topics might sound heavy, but in SHINee’s capable hands, the lyrics are transcendent. As the chorus of “The Feeling” climbs to the stratosphere, SHINee sound not like legendary idols, but instead, like four guys bravely running towards the light.

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