EXO’s Chen Opens Up About His Long-Awaited Homecoming With Album “Last Scene”

Kim Jongdae, best known initially to fans as Chen, a member of the record-breaking group K-pop EXO, shared a promotional image for his third solo album of a mostly bare room replicated nine times. Shot through a sheer-curtained window, each photo is bathed in a different rich color – purple, blue, orange, green, and in the center, a muted gray. In each one he plants himself in a new position as if surveying the room from different angles, swathed in warm-hued light. He sits on a windowsill, stares through to the outside, and leans against a counter looking straight into the camera. The effect feels like an old-fashioned slide projector scanning through some kind of homecoming, illuminating the memories of a static environment with an ever-shifting perspective.

The idea of homecoming feels fitting for Chen. “A lot of things changed, and my thoughts changed during my recent hiatus,” he tells Teen Vogue over a video call from Seoul. The hiatus he refers to is the mandatory military service that is required for almost all men under the age of 28 in South Korea. After enlisting back in 2020, he was discharged in April of this year.

This new album is ironically called Last Scene, despite it being his re-entry into the world of making music, and its release acts as a sort of bookend to this break. His last solo album, Dear My Dear, and EXO album, Obsession, were both released in 2019. There’s a calm ease that radiates from Chen as he muses on approaching his comfortable creative bedfellow with a renewed frame of mind. “I was able to look back on who I am and reflect on what I am feeling,” he says. “There were a lot of questions that I asked myself throughout this process. It was a time for me to discover more about myself, and I spent time contemplating what I needed to be able to express my stories and ideas.” 

The result is a compact but full six-track album, led by its titular song which is an orchestral, epic ballad about heartbreak. Fans will likely feel a soothing sense of familiarity with his genre of choice, as it’s one that has defined his solo output and led to him being dubbed the “Ballad King.”

Time feels omnipresent in conversation with Chen, in both the answers he gives and the space he lingers to take pause in his reflections. Each sentence feels completely intentional, like he doesn’t want to let a single important word go unsaid or clumsily expressed. In a field as fast-moving as K-pop, taking time is a luxury. It’s a concept that sits firmly at the center of the industry. Albums are numbered, birthdays marked with commemorative merch drops, group anniversaries dutifully celebrated like festivals, and metaphorical timers run down, for men at least, to the moment they choose to enlist. Chen’s military service overlapped with a landmark date in his career, EXO’s tenth anniversary.

Chen found fame in 2012 when EXO debuted as an all-singing, all-dancing, all-superpowered group (their concept literally involved each member taking on a particular power to be associated with). Like the lightning that a fresh-faced 19-year-old Chen adopted as a force, they sliced blindingly through the scene to become one of the most successful groups in history, amassing millions of fans worldwide and an enormously dedicated following that’s still anomalous in modern pop music. At the inception of that decade, Chen bowled over new fans with a juxtaposition of unassuming, boyish looks and a velvety, cavernous vocal prowess that lent itself not only to the 15 albums that he’s been a part of with EXO (to date) but to subunit EXO-CBX (alongside bandmates Baekhyun and Xiumin), countless K-Drama OSTs, and the now-three solo albums to his name. As anyone evolving through the ages of 20 to 30 can attest, it’s a period of time chronicled by immeasurable growth and some rather momentous personal life changes.

“With the spotlight comes the responsibility to keep working on myself, and to do my best in every given opportunity. I think these areas have been the biggest areas of change for me: a growing sense of responsibility, and to continuously strive to be a better version of myself, especially on stage,” Chen reflects, once again musing on the nearly packaged decennium of his fame. “When I look back at the past ten years, it still seems like a dream to me. Who else could have experienced what I’ve experienced, and go through what I’ve been through? There are times, even now, when it’s hard for me to grasp onto the fact that I have experienced these things, and that I am a person in the spotlight.”

He’s been fondly reminiscing a lot recently, maybe as a result of being able to celebrate milestones not usually afforded to his contemporaries. He thinks about the early days of EXO and the memories built with its members. The mention of his eight friends elicits a visible warmth that radiates through the screen. The value he places on them is inarguable, especially their support around the release of this long-awaited comeback. “I can’t fully express it in words, but each member gave me a lot of encouragement. They were a great source of strength for me,” he says. “I can still remember how each member treated me like nothing was happening, as though everything was just the same. I get overwhelmed thinking about it.”

There’s clearly an unbreakable bond between the group, something forged in the unique whirlwind they found themselves in 2013 when their album, XOXO, and its lead single “Growl,” became the first K-pop album in over a decade to sell a million copies. It’s impossible to overstate the stratospheric success Chen experienced alongside the rest of EXO, and this concept-appropriate lightning-in-a-bottle moment has filled his thoughts of late. “A memory that suddenly comes into mind is, and I don’t know why, but it’s when we first released our Growl album. It’s the album that played the biggest role in making EXO who we are today, and I had a lot of fun.” He adds that sometimes videos of performances of the song, which are cringingly early 2010’s in their styling, will pop up on his YouTube feed but he’s too embarrassed to click. “I get very shocked watching myself.”

Chen gives the impression of a traveler making stops on a journey through his own past, which is what homecomings often feel like. Like we’re watching an old movie with characters we vaguely remember. The memories we cherish aren’t always the ones we thought we’d hold dear, and moments of insignificance sometimes metastasise into the building blocks of who we become later down the line. “I want to tell my younger self to learn to enjoy each moment a bit more,” Chen says. “I was very young back then, and compared to my age and experience, I received so much love and popularity. I wasn’t able to receive this love and appreciation as wholeheartedly as I hoped. There were times when I blamed myself for this. I look back and wonder now, only if I knew how to enjoy it a bit more. I might have been able to attempt and achieve more things. There’s a sense of regret that remains in me.” Revisiting familiar haunts also makes us confront the reality that our perception of spaces entirely changes depending on where we visit them in our lives. For Chen, the industry and fans may be the same, but he is different.

He’s channeled that new perspective into this album which, alongside the titular ballad, ventures into fresh solo territory like leaning into the R&B and pop that litters EXO’s discography. Those genres are sprinkled into the fourth track on the album, a relatable, and self-penned, ode to unrequited love called “I Don’t Even Mind” which he says took two hours to write.

“It was supposed to be a sketch, so I was a little suspicious when the team told me a couple of days later that these were the final lyrics that were chosen for the song. I said, ‘Are you sure? Is this right?,’” he says, laughing. The art of songwriting isn’t something that necessarily comes naturally to him, but it’s something he notes that allows him to express his interiority in new ways. “I think I get my inspiration from my day-to-day life. It might be a word that clings to me from a conversation with someone, or I also like to write songs based on my personal experiences. In the past, I used my imagination to write songs, but with ‘I Don’t Even Mind,’ I wanted to capture myself, just as I am.”

Another crucial distinction from previous releases was the power of learning to share the load. In interviews around his last album, he mentioned being so stressed he found it hard to sleep. “With the first and second solo albums, I had a lot of ambition and desire. I was quite stubborn about what I wanted to do, and I expressed this quite clearly during our meetings,” he says. “I decided to let go of my stubbornness and listen to the voices around me.” Looking outward and accepting help from others also helped him focus on his true motivations through the reeds. “You know I love music, but I don’t think it’s possible to do it by myself. I know it’s a very cliché answer, but my fans are my biggest motivation. The reason why I could do my music until now is because I have people who love me and support me, and because there is someone that is listening to my voice.” And as for being able to get some shut-eye? “I slept well.”

After any homecoming comes a period of bedding in. The newly familiar becomes comfortable again and focus shifts to where we point that solace next. Within the gilded trappings of stasis grows possibility and the chance for further success with the safety net of security. “As time goes on, I want to be more authentic and be open to express myself fully,” Chen says, hopeful for the opportunities yet to come. “I hope to be someone who is approachable and relatable to my fans, not just in my solo activities, but also in my group activities.”

Once again, talk turns back to EXO, a homecoming within his homecoming. “To be back on stage as a group, to sing together — I missed being together with the group the most,” he says. “It’s already been 10 years for [EXO] as a group, and I can’t wait to see who we will become in the years to come.” For Chen, the future hopefully looks a lot like what he’s known before, just saturated with new lights and colors. And that’s everything he could hope for.

Additional translation by Grace Yoo.