THE SIN: VANISH is a narrative-driven EP which draws on ENHYPEN’s vampire concept and associated lore. Guest starring Park Jeong-min as a newsreader/investigative journalist, the album utilises first-person narration to tell the story of the forbidden romance between a vampire and their lover. While the album has been termed as experimental due to its format, concept albums are the bread and butter of the K-pop industry, and the flow between the spoken and sung word is seamless rather than jarring (which it could have been given its form). Indeed, such hybrid albums have a long history, with the earliest being traced back to the 1940s, creating a unique artistic experience.
THE SIN: VANISH uses a fictional investigative broadcast show, The Mystery Show, as an organizational mechanism, to narrate a gothic tale of desire, death and deception, based on forbidden love between a vampire and a human and the subsequent disappearance of seven vampires as they attempt to protect the human from becoming a member of the living dead The album consists of six tracks, interspersed with four narrations and one skit; 사건의 너머/ “Beyond the Incident” (Narration); “No Way Back” (Feat. So!YoON); 도망자들/“The Fugitives” (Narration); Knife; Stealer; 우리가 찾던 목소리/The Voice (Narration); 목격자/The Witnesses”; “Big Girls Don’t Cry”; “Lost Island”; “Sleep Tight”; 사건의 너머/“The Beyond” (Narration).
The polyglot narration in which news reporters in Tokyo, Seoul, and New York report on the missing seven reflects the globalised nature of contemporary K-Pop, oscillating between Korean, Japanese, and English. An online news site, VAMPIRE NOW, offers tantalising clues about the mysterious disappearance of the seven vampires alongside lifestyle and associated content aimed at the fanged undead. Drawing on the original manga series and offering additional content, an anime DARK MOON: The Blood Altar premiered on Crunchyroll on 9th January 2026. In a recent interview, Jay stated: “For this album, everything is connected into one storyline – music, narration, performance, music videos, concept photos, and even promotions … From track one to the last, it induces the album’s theme of escape” (Kim Jae-heun, The Korean Herald, 16 January 2025).
As an immersive experience for fans, this latest EP from ENHYPEN is a paradigmatic example of transmedia storytelling, adding to the complexity of the storyworld and aimed at a global audience. Vampires have always signified “otherness”, which is marked out through the conflation of desire and death. However, they haven’t always been Byronic romantic antiheroes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1900) is hideous to look at in his natural state – as depicted in early unofficial cinematic adaptations including Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, Germany: 1922) and Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, US: 1932) – while Chinese hopping vampires (jiangshi) are literally decaying corpses who seek to steal your life force. In the West, Anne Rice’s vampire novels, TheVampire Chronicles (1976-2018), shifted representational strategies, offering sympathetic and empathetic stories in which the bloodsucker’s voice was centered: Lestat telling the traumatic story of his life to a reporter, who, despite the vampire’s warnings, decides that vampirism is preferable to staying a human. As abject beings who cross the boundary between life and death, vampires have often been interpreted as metaphors for disease and otherness. Anne Rice’s reinterpretation of the vampire was inspired by her daughter’s death from leukemia. Sexually ambiguous beings, vampires are not constrained by heteronormativity or patriarchal privilege: Camilla’s seduction of Laura in Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story of the same name (1872) foregrounds the sapphic pleasures of vampirism. In conservative South Korea, vampires can be understood as functioning as an implicit critique of the demonisation of the LGBTQ+ as well as other marginalised communities and groups, including women. If the theme of the album is escape, the question is escape from what? Perhaps from a rigid hierarchical system which creates and isolates this, it sees it as others: forbidden love operating as a metaphor for transgression and breaking of rules.
The EP begins with “Beyond the Incident,” which functions as a gothic framing device. Narrated by Park Jeong-min it introduces the listener to the vampires and the mystery surrounding their disappearance: “Their story, once thought to have vanished into darkness, returns to the centre of the world” ending with “The story begins to unfold in an entirely new direction”. This can be interpreted as an allusion to the circulation of misinformation and fake news, which epitomises contemporary society in which the truth is hard to identify: in the EP, we are offered multiple voices and multiple interpretations of events. This is followed by “No Way Back” (Feat. So!YoON), an alternative R&B track with rock influences, communicating the despair underpinning the disappearance.
While a featured artist, So!YoON does not simply jet in for a solo verse, but rather her voice commingles with those of the group, emphasising the collaborative nature of the project. This is followed by the second narration, “The Fugitives” which explores the feelings of the doomed lovers, telling us that in the public’s opinion: “That they would quickly discover their limits and fall into despair / They would come to regret their reckless choice”. However, we are offered an alternative version of events: “Having shattered the rules / And calling to each other across the wreckage of their past / They seemed to overflow with confidence / They could build a heaven with their own two hands”. “Knife”, the fourth track and lead single, draws from classic East Coast Hip-hop, or boom-bap, known as such because of the use of the kick drum (“boom”) and snare (“bap”), and is the type of energetic music that ENHYPEN excel at, as the music and performance videos demonstrate. It has hit written all over it. This is followed by “Stealer,” which oozes sexuality and sensuality, both lyrically and sonically, with lyrics such as “Sweat drips down, flushed red cheeks” and “The thrill of that sensual touch, uh”, and latin inspired rhythms.
“The Voice” is a short narration telling us what to expect from the next track: “Coming up, the ‘voices’ of witnesses / Who saw the vanished vampire lovers will follow”. This track, appropriately titled “Witnesses,” is also in narrated form. In it, one of the witnesses, a man, comments: “What do you think awaits them at the end of their escape? Sadly, nothing but regret. By now they’re probably trembling with anxiety. They might even be crying’. “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, a folksy pop ballad which runs at under two minutes, skilfully combines acoustics and synthesizers, foregrounds female empowerment through intertextual referencing to Fergie’s 2006 smash hit of the same name. “Lost Island” foregrounds the eroticism of the Western vampire narrative: “Rising pleasure, we own it / Only ours, our scene, holding hands tight”. The final sung track is “Sleep Tight,” which is Jake’s first official self-composed track, with HEESEUNG contributing lyrics. This R&B-influenced song produces proof of ENHYPEN’s musicality necessary for longevity in the cutthroat world of K-Pop. While the chorus relates to the ongoing story, it can also be seen as a direct address to their fans: “Baby, come and lay with me tonight / This night, under the moonlight sinking deep (Ah-ah) / Without any worries, just sleep tight (Tight) / I’ll watch over you, a lullaby just for you, yeah”. The EP closes with the narrated “The Beyond,” which ends the album on a circular note: “The story begins to unfold / In an entirely new direction.” As in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, the voice of the vampire and their lived-reality becomes centred with public reactions exposed as xenophobic. The EP leaves us with several unanswered questions:” Where will the vampires escape to?” “What is next for them?” and “Will true love overcome prejudice?” Only time and future releases will tell.
Last year, ENHYPEN won its first Daesang (grand prize) at the 2025 MAMA awards for “Fan’s Choice Of The Year”. The group cemented their growing international and iconic status, winning “Icon of the Year” at The Fact Music Awards (TFMA) and “Album of the Year” at Asia Star Entertainer Awards (ASEA). They completed a highly successful world tour and occupied screens throughout the world and hearts of fans with ENHYPEN VR CONCERT: IMMERSION. As such, much is expected of ENHYPEN this year to build on their growing global success. THE SIN: VANISH cements ENHYPEN as fourth-generation leaders and demonstrates their growing artistry and status within the global music industry.
THE SIN: VANISH was released on 16th January with individual remixes released on 19th, which feature voice notes and individualised versions of “Knife”.
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Written by Dr Colette Balmain
Featured image courtesy of BE:LIFT LAB
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