“I thought at first Vietnamese and Spanish would be really hard,” MIDNATT recalls of the recording process. “The project came to be by talking about these language barriers.”Įven with global appeal among the HYBE artists (albums from BTS, TXT, SEVENTEEN and ENHYPEN made up half of the IFPI’s global top 10 album sales chart last year), the corporation saw their tech advancements as an opportunity to align with MIDNATT’s larger conversations.įor “Masquerade,” MIDNATT initially recorded in Korean, with the song later translated into five other languages. “When I would listen to music in other languages, I couldn’t immerse into the music as well as in my native language, and we were talking about how we could overcome those language barriers,” MIDNATT adds. In fact, MIDNATT’s focus on accessibility and deeper connection with people worldwide looks to somewhat tackle a hurdle in the Korean-pop industry of getting listeners past any language barriers. I’m kind of feeling pressure right now because I didn’t expect this to be this big of a project.”

He said, ‘You have that voice in you why don’t we develop your voice from there?’ And that’s how the whole project came to begin. “He listened to the demo that I recorded for producer Bang before I even debuted - I couldn’t even remember I did that - but he remembered that I recorded in an R&B style in falsetto. “ producer Hitchhiker said, ‘You have something different in you, something alternative in you, so let’s bring that out,'” MIDNATT says of a chat with the experimental hitmaker, who has delivered his brand of mind-bending EDM for artists like BoA, Super Junior, EXO, Red Velvet and NCT for over a decade.

While BIGHIT MUSIC artists like BTS and TOMORROW X TOGETHER have transformed the global music industry, a project like MIDNATT (which translates to “mid night” in Swedish and “bare face” in Korean) allows a more senior soloist the rare chance in K-pop to take on a new musical identity and concept.

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