An artist creates music oftentimes by drawing themselves to think about their darkest memories. But this simple statement isn’t as easy as it is made out to be. Creating lyrics can be easy as they are words but putting meaning and conveying raw emotions are difficult to capture, and perhaps that is what makes the music journey an emotional process. Added to that, there is the fact of producing backing vocals, as well the instrumentals for music. There are a few extremely talented artists that can capture the theory of music crafting and utilize it to their own life experiences.  

Popular Kpop-artist Suga, also known as Agust D, has released his newest album since his mixtapes in 2016 and 2020 on Friday, April 21st, 2023.  The artist’s release marks an exciting chapter to his upcoming world tour in Korea and the U.S as well as other parts of Eastern and Southern Asia. 

Agust D’s latest album release is titled as D-day consisting of 10 tracks in total. From listening to this album, the atmosphere is completely different from his previous mixtapes that talk about Agust D’s journey as an artist in the Kpop industry. In this album he delves deeper into his emotional past, and his journey of becoming the person he is now. 

As the album suggests, the first song off of this newest album is the song D-day. 

Interestingly enough, the rap artist introduces the song by talking about the fact that D-day is coming, and that until that future comes, people will ride or die and karma will treat them with the truth they need to face. As D-day is a trilogy of his mixtapes, Agust D  seems to write about how instead of looking at the past with regret, one should try to look in a mirror and let go of everything that is in the past, and let one’s past self die out, and to try to live as a new person. This perspective and idea of being free from the past continues as his next two following tracks HUH and Haegeum go into more depth, about being free, and unlocking new opportunities and the vast amount of potential people have as they move forward in their life. 

Continuing to listen to the album, in terms of meaning, the two songs that stick out to me from this album are AMYGDALA and People Pt. 2. These songs are quite reflective, containing somber lyrics that change the tone that the album had first started off with. 

When I had first heard of AMYGDALA, the song had already sounded quite sad, as if the song was saying a farewell to past memories. Looking at the lyrics, the song brings life back into some of the strongest memories that linger in Agust D’s  mind. He talks about how he wishes his amygdala would save him, and the suffering that he had faced would only leave him to grow stronger as an individual, becoming more resilient than before. 

To me, AMYGDALA is a song that can touch a lot of people. Although people cannot forget trauma or other emotional experiences, people can grow to become stronger than they are before. Of course, memories of pain do not go away, and that is what our brain structure, amygdala, is for. However, pain is the course of people’s lives so while it cannot go away, time can make it easier for people to move on. 

After listening to People Pt.2 for a numerous amount of time, it has become one of my favorite songs to listen to. Artist Agust D once again collaborates with IU, an artist he has worked on several songs with before. Although the song talks about the struggles of forming connections with people, and how time lets people go, it also mentions that people are selfish yet selfless at the same time. Selflessness can be seen as a disguise of selfishness. People do selfless things because they want to keep people close to them. We as people don’t think of that too often, and perhaps realizing this too late makes us feel more pain when we realize the connections and bonds with people we’ve lost. 

The album concludes with the song Life Goes On, the song being the companion song to BTS’s  Life Goes On. It is interesting that the artist reflects back on this song. In BTS’s song Life Goes On, the song reflects many of the inner struggles that people had to face as the pandemic hit them, and they were left to struggle. The song gives a hopeful message that although the world is struggling there will be a time where all of the memories of the pandemic are just simple memories. In Agust D’s song, this message is also conveyed, through the message that “Time is like a wave It will be washed away like the ebb.” Some people will be forgotten in time, but in one way time is endless because a person has people to remember them by. The future may seem far, but it draws close and close as days pass. 

Overall, the album touches on the emotions that people struggle with everyday, and suffer with. The album is a reflective piece of work that deeply touches on Agust D’s past as he reflects on the crucial and most critical parts of his life.  It touches on pain and grief, the various ways that people can cope with it, while also realizing that nothing lasts forever.  Life goes on, as simple as that. It is the existential fear that people have to come to accept and realize before they can change how they want to live.