With ‘NOW Project’, MONSTA X Comes Full Circle

To celebrate their tenth anniversary, the group released a digital album with re-recordings of music made while their leader SHOWNU enlisted in the military. The new music shows how transgressive MONSTA X has become since debut.

Starship Entertainment

When K-Pop broke into the mainstream in 2020, a group that seemed positioned for superstardom was MONSTA X. The six member group had spent the past three years steadily working the Western market, beginning with the Beautiful World Tour. They were the first K-Pop group to release an English language album, ALL ABOUT LUV, on Valentine’s Day and - had the pandemic not disrupted plans - would have continued a rigorous promotional and tour schedule to target Western audiences. 

That year, though, BTS and BLACKPINK became the formidable leaders of the industry. MONSTA X would release a second English language album, The Dreaming, in 2021 but really, the group cut their losses. For the next two years the MONSTAs chose to focus on Korean releases that positioned them as one of the most transgressive groups in the industry. 

This week, MONSTA X is celebrating their tenth anniversary. That they have lasted this long is an accomplishment. MX come from Starship Entertainment, a smaller company that had to work harder to compete with companies from the Big Three (SM, JYP and YG). MX didn’t receive their first Korean music show win until 2017. Two years later, WONHO left the group after he was falsely accused of drug use and within a few months they shifted their focus to America, only to face disappointment when other groups became K-Pop superstars. 

Over the past few years, groups that debuted alongside MONSTA X have disbanded as their contracts expired. Others, like NCT, have been weighed down by controversies or a bloated discography. But the MONSTAs have gone the opposite way: Over the past five years, the group has evolved into a radical idol group that tests how progressive men in K-Pop can be. 

On Wednesday, the group released NOW Project Volume 1, a re-recording record that adds leader SHOWNU’s vocals to ten tracks released while he was in the military. The album is both a commemoration of the group’s time together and a reimagining of what the music would have sounded like had SHONWU been able to promote. 

The selections are well curated: Each comeback title track is included as well as several career-peak b-sides. The group has never sounded as thrilling as they do on tracks like “Autobahn” or “Lone Ranger” and it’s a welcome surprise to finally have SHOWNU’s voice featured on the tracks. Other tracks, like “Deny” and “MERCY”, sounded tailor made for SHOWNU when they were first released, and received a boost from his vocals. 

The re-recordings for NOW Project are so faithful that sometimes you can barely tell where SHOWNU’s voice has been added. That is by design, as seen in a behind the scenes video that features JOOHONEY, rapper and vocalist, directing SHOWNU.

“You can do it in your style,” he tells SHOWNU as he records “LOVE”, but often the goal is to dutifully match what is already on record. “You have to hit the words in between,” JOOHONEY says, emphasizing how it should sound, “to get the vibe right.” Other times, he has SHOWNU listen to the original vocals, usually HYUNGWON’s, to hear exactly how to imitate the sound. 

The purpose, SHOWNU explained in a quick interview after the first day of recording, was to have music he could perform at the group’s concerts. On the day of NOW Project’s release, the first round of tour dates were announced – the MONSTAs will hold a two day concert in Seoul in July. 

Military eras are often perilous times for idol groups. In the past, enlistment periods meant that a group’s time had come to a close. Today an enlistment period often doesn’t mean the end for a group; many like HIGHLIGHT or INFINITE come back stronger and sometimes without the company that debuted them. 

But, ironically, when SHOWNU left for the military in 2021, the MONSTAs had begun to hit a creative stride.In the summer of 2020, MONSTA X released FANTASIA X, an album that represented the first major shift in the group’s artistry. Here, the group leaned harder into the theatrics. JOOHONEY, a magnetic rapper and vocalist, attacked his verses on the title track with an exaggerated wink. (“Fantastic, that’s me cause I slay,” he shouts in the opening verse.) In concept photos, the groups resembled the chiseled Greek statues they stood next to. 

The next two comebacks, “FATAL LOVE” and “The Gambler”, positioned the MONSTAs as a group of men. Their muscles were bigger, their outfits were tighter and they sang frankly, often explicitly, about sex. (“I want you to eat me like a main dish,” I.M. teases on “Love Killa”) 

The group’s first release following SHOWNU’s enlistment was “NO LIMIT”, an EP that perfectly captured the group’s wild, sometimes erotic, energy. “Rush Hour”, the title track, was similar to some of their biggest comebacks like “Alligator” or “FOLLOW”, but it also hit harder thanks to an aggressive production by JOOHONEY and Ye-Yo!. Out of all of the EPs released during the enlistment period, this remains my favorite. JOOHONEY and I.M. wrote or produced every track, and the group had a firm hand in the creative direction. 

MONSTA X in 2015

In the early years, producers didn’t know how to handle how gigantic MONSTA X could sound. Each member posed challenges for a production team: MINHYUK and SHOWNU, who have perhaps the easiest voices, could sound grating on the wrong track. KIHYUN can belt so loudly that glass can break, while the rapline needs experimental production to really tear apart a verse. At times, this worked: “Hero”, their earliest breakthrough track, gets the maximalism just right. But other times, like with forgettable EPs such as THE CLAN pt. 2 <GUILTY>, the results were middling. 

A challenge, too, is that MONSTA X was never going to be a conservative group. Their strength is their masculinity and, by extension, their sexuality. “We're not ashamed. We've done a lot of sexual items, like harnesses and chains,” CHANGKYUN told GQ in 2019. As the group leaned harder into those two qualities, the music often seemed as if it would snap off had producers not contained the members. 

SHOWNU’s enlistment period changed this.  HYUNGWON, JOOHONEY and CHANGKYUN had always been given an unusual amount of input on their music, but by 2021, the men took a firmer stance on creative control. JOOHONEY and CHANGKYUN began to produce the music, while HYUNGWON co-wrote a handful of songs with the pair. 

On “LONE RANGER”, an excellent b-side from “REASON”, they mix a Western twang with a massive bass. HYUNGWON, JOOHONEY and I.M. arranged, produced and wrote the lyrics for this one, giving KIHYUN a runway to belt the chorus. On other tracks like “BEAUTIFUL LIAR”, the group wins by pounding the listener into submission, either from a thumping bass or creating production that lets the rapline spit absolute bars. 

By the time SHAPE OF LOVE was released, the group was participating in contract negotiations. The tea leaves seemed to favor the two most likely to depart, CHANGKYUN and JOOHONEY, who seemed eager to have more autonomy in their careers. But promo images for the EP, which were oddly wholesome for a group that enjoyed wearing harnesses and chains, also seemed to hint at a farewell.

Luckily, SHAPE OF LOVE was not a goodbye record. While CHANGKYUN chose to not resign with Starship, he remains in the group. The music, meanwhile, continued to evolve. If the previous two releases depicted a harder version of MX, this EP was introspective of their time together. The music took a broad view of love, but the biggest story came from their time together. They were a group that shouldn’t have made it this far, that shouldn’t have grown this much – but here they were. 

Two years later as SHOWNU recorded vocals for NOW Project, the most cathartic moments came at bookends. The final track, “IT’S ALRIGHT”, is the most direct about his relationship to the members and their fans: “It’s alright, I’m gonna make it back to you,” he sings in a chorus that feels almost meta, “We’ll be the greatest, when we’re together.” 

But I’m most struck by “사랑한다”, which translates to “love you” in Korean. That track is a b-side from SHAPE OF LOVE and, like with “IT’S ALRIGHT”, takes on a new meaning when sung by SHOWNU. Near the end of the song, as the group chants the final chorus, they eventually fade out and only leave SHOWNU to sing the final  “사랑한다”. 

Before he recorded the line, JOOHONEY only had one piece of advice for the leader: “Do it with real love.”