The SHINee star opens up to NME about why he needed to broaden his horizons and how that culminated in his new mini-album ‘Eternal’, his first release since leaving SM Entertainment R ecently, K-pop star Taemin has been looking into the big things. Well, actually, they’re the very small things – the world of atoms, sub-atoms and the fundamental building blocks of everything in existence. “Those are things I really thought about when I was really young!” he tells NME over a video call from Seoul.
“About consciousness, about whether this moment right now is truly real, about the concept of time...
” He trails off in an excitable way that is immediately recognisable to anyone who’s found themself desperate to talk about their new obsession with anyone who will listen. “This whole field about the quantum, that what we think is this small unit but is actually something like magic, I found it interesting so I started looking it up and just kept getting deeper into it,” he says enthusiastically about the unlikely inspirations for his new mini-album, ‘Eternal’ . It’s his first release under Big Planet Made , the label he joined after leaving long-time agency SM Entertainment .
More notably, though, it’s also the first project in the SHINee singer’s decade-long solo career that he’s had substantial creative input in. Folding the idea of the quantum realm into an album comeback may feel expansive, but Taemin has never shied away from lofty concepts in h.