Nine years into THE BOYZ, JACOB is the first current member to step out alone, and j. doesn't announce that fact so much as insist on it. Released on 10 June 2026, the seven-track project trades the group's maximalism for something closer to a diary entry: soft, unhurried, built around a version of JACOB that fans have only glimpsed in fragments, on SoundCloud uploads and between comebacks.

The timing wasn't incidental. JACOB describes it as tied to his birthday and to a broader sense of reset within the group, the kind of moment where waiting any longer would have meant not doing it at all. That instinct runs through the whole record. j. isn't positioned as a rebrand or a detour. It's the sound he says he's wanted to make since before debut, filtered through nearly a decade of restraint.

The cover reflects that same logic. A vintage, deliberately obscured image of himself, chosen not for polish but for mystery, feels like a rejection of the usual solo-debut imagery: no direct gaze, no branding exercise, just a moment that happened to get caught on camera during the "Slow Dancing" shoot and stuck.

JACOB wrote and produced every track, working with collaborators including THE BOYZ's own SUNWOO on "Back and Forth," a song he says came together in a single pass because Sunwoo already understood the assignment. Some of the album's most loved moments, including "Promise" and "Misunderstood," almost didn't make the cut. JACOB says a handful of songs weren't part of the original tracklist, added later because he felt the record needed their colour to feel complete. That instinct for editing his own work and trusting it enough to change it sits at the centre of everything he says about j.