FIRST PRESS

There is a moment, about two-thirds of the way through the music video for "heal," when the song finally stops holding its breath. The track has spent its opening minutes in deliberate restraint — a spare, almost weightless introduction, vocals placed close to the ear — and then the chorus detonates, all at once, into something heavy and cathartic and stadium-sized. It's a structural trick as old as pop music. What makes it land is that Monsta X have spent eleven years earning the right to use it.

Unfold, released April 3 via Intertwine Records, is Monsta X's third full-length studio album in English — a sentence no other K-pop act can put on a press release. Nobody else has made even two. Billboard noted the milestone at release: with Unfold, the Starship Entertainment sextet — Shownu, Minhyuk, Kihyun, Hyungwon, Joohoney, I.M — became the first act in the genre's history to release three English-language albums. The first, All About Luv (2020), debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200. The second, The Dreaming (2021), landed at No. 3 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart, wedged into a Christmas-week chart between Adele and Olivia Rodrigo. Unfold arrives not as an experiment but as the third act of a thesis the group has been writing since before most of their fourth-generation peers debuted.

The rollout was patient to the point of confidence. "baby blue" arrived all the way back in November 2025; "growing pains" followed in February. By the time the full ten-track album surfaced in April with "heal" at the top of the running order, the record's emotional architecture was already legible: this is an album about the distance between hurting and getting better, sequenced like a recovery that doesn't go in a straight line. At a lean 30 minutes, it moves through synth-pop, trap, and contemporary R&B without ever feeling like a sampler platter — track titles like "glass half empty," "enemies with benefits," and "sorry to myself" telegraph the terrain.

This is an album about the distance between hurting and getting better, sequenced like a recovery that doesn't go in a straight line.

"heal" is the centerpiece, and it knows it. The video frames the song's question literally — two people locked in a cycle of damage and attachment, unable to let go, the title hanging over them like a dare. The production, helmed by Jeoff Harris, resists the maximalist instincts of the group's mid-career singles; it builds in patient layers and spends its biggest gesture exactly once. The album's wider credit sheet is its own story, running from David A. Stewart — yes, the Eurythmics one — through a deep bench of contemporary writers and producers including Freddy Wexler, MoZella, Lindy Robbins, Rykeyz, BRELAND, and Kill Dave. That is not the credits page of a localization exercise. It's the credits page of an American pop album that happens to be sung by the most durable live act K-pop has produced.

The label line matters here too. Intertwine Records — the imprint founded in 2021 by longtime Monsta X manager Eshy Gazit, with Monsta X and Wonho as its inaugural signings — has always carried a five-word mission statement: connecting people through music. Gazit, a two-time Billboard International Power Player who served as A&R on all three of the group's English albums, has spent the better part of a decade arguing that Korean artists shouldn't need a translation layer to compete in the American market. The first two albums made that argument with collaborations — the Steve Aoki, Sebastián Yatra, French Montana, Pitbull, and will.i.am features that mapped Monsta X onto the American pop grid. Unfold makes it differently: no feature crutches, no co-sign scaffolding. Ten songs, six voices, and the quiet swagger of a team that has done this twice before and kept the receipts.

That confidence carried into the television run. The group took "heal" to the Kelly Clarkson Show and to Good Morning America — daytime slots that a decade ago required a viral moment and a begging campaign for a K-pop act to book, and which Monsta X now walks into as returning veterans. It's worth remembering that this is the group that broke the iHeartRadio barrier for the genre — first K-pop act on the Jingle Ball Tour in 2018, first on the festival's main stage in 2019 — and that those firsts were treated, at the time, as flukes. Three English albums later, the flukes have a discography.

What distinguishes Unfold from its predecessors is its refusal to chase. All About Luv was a charm offensive; The Dreaming was a flex. Unfold is neither. It is the first of the three that sounds like it was made for the group's own catalog rather than for the crossover argument — which, paradoxically, makes the strongest crossover argument yet. The pre-releases breathe. The title track waits. The album ends on "sorry to myself," an apology pointed inward rather than at an audience. Eleven years and two sold-out world tours into their run, Monsta X are no longer asking American pop for permission. They're filing paperwork in its native language.

The early word has followed. The single drew song-review coverage within hours of release, the trades called the title track an "emotional anthem," and the band's spring has run through award-show stages and morning television without breaking stride. None of that is the point, though. The point is simpler, and it's right there in the title track's slow exhale of a chorus: healing, like a career, is not an event. It's a practice. Monsta X have been practicing longer than anyone.