I’ve thought about what it would mean to hold your heart in your hands. The premise is impossible, of course—you can’t actually hold a heart. But even if it were possible, why do it? Maybe it’s about wanting control over something that by its very nature operates outside all that. When it lurches and shakes out of control, there’s nothing to be done. You can cover your face or press both hands to your chest and it still won’t settle down. What’s interesting is that, no matter how violently it pounds, the sound never leaves the two of you. That fiercely furious drumming belongs to you alone. A heartbeat is the most private rhythm there is—a quiet, constant longing.

Maybe there’s times you want to hold the heart at arm’s length where you can keep an eye on it. Like when a single glance, a single touch, sets off the kind of emotional fireworks that feel like your whole world and you just can’t shake off the fallout. Or when you realize you’ve even been lying to yourself, going through the motions and pretending you’re fine. Someone will always trot out the cliché that time heals all, but in reality, time only ever proves how long the fallout lasts. And the source of all those complex feelings, fireworks and all, is the heart. And once you’ve arrived at that conclusion, you want to reach in and rip it out just so you can get a grip on the emotions you have no words to express.

“Unpiltered” is WONPIL’s first mini album, and it’s full of those emotional fireworks and their fallout. Fragments spanning the full spectrum of feelings—addiction, breakdown, erosion, exhilaration, recovery, vulnerability, longing—
spread out across the album like a scatter plot. What forms is a picture that starts with excitement and pleasure and ends in anguish or pain, or perhaps something that can’t be named at all. Plot those points on a graph and they once again form a heart. To peel back the layers to get to the source of all that feeling, the person from whose perspective “Unpiltered” is sung ends up holding that heart of theirs in their hands. To put it another way, they put the source of that emotion where it can be seen perfectly clearly, unfiltered.

A diary or love letter that wants to be found
There’s something soft and gentle about “Pilmography,” the solo album WONPIL put out back in 2022. It laid the uncertainty and fear underneath to rest as though with a warm blanket, looking toward the future with a reassuring tone in lines like “it’ll be okay” (“Someday, spring will come”) and “one day it’ll take shape” (“Unpainted canvas”), and promising “I’ll be better, just wait” (“A journey”). The singer even turns to the person they’re breaking up with to wish their “tomorrow would be a better day” (“Voiceless”). Altogether, the album felt like a diary—a warmhearted collection of different stories in one volume.

“Unpiltered,” by contrast, is rooted in the present. It’s sharp and scattered, feeling more like a mosaic pieced together at random. After all, emotions are uncontrollable. But there’s one thing the two albums share, and that’s the urge to take control. The lyrics suggest pushing feelings away to keep from getting in too deep (“Toxic Love”), then taking confident steps to take control of a relationship (“Up All Night”). Even in the cute buildup to coming clean about their feelings in “Hold My Love,” this person’s trying to play it cool (“heart, don’t you dare give me away”). The control here isn’t just about romance, showing up in the way they approach their life, too. They resist being adult because “growing up’s no fun” (“Already Grown Up”) but at the same time “charge into the fray” (“Step by Step”). Ironically, all of this only proves how intensely they feel everything. Confessing their love with a cry of “my piano’s calling out to you” (“Piano”) and saying “rescue me” with zero pretense (“Highs and Lows”) feels more like surrendering to their feelings and admitting they’ve lost the fight for control.

That’s just how direct and unadorned “Unpiltered” is. Writing down your emotions in such raw detail is like keeping a diary you really want someone to read. It’s the contradiction of wanting someone to dig into the most personal, private thing you have. Making your diary an open book isn’t so different from writing a letter you’ll never send—wanting to be understood while still holding back, hiding but hoping to be found, drawing a line that isn’t meant to be crossed while secretly hoping someone’s there waiting on the other side. But that contradiction is actually the sincerest form of desire there is—the desire to be understood, to feel seen, to let someone else hear your heart beat.

Setting heartbeat to music on the page
The music on “Unpiltered” strays from the norm and defies expectations. Emotions come to a furious boil, only to go quiet in an instant, then spill over with a wail once again. As a rock song, the album opener, “Toxic Love,” is familiar territory for DAY6 member WONPIL, but the drum pattern underpinning the whole thing is rooted in hip hop, as all the while a bombastic guitar tears across the entire track.

That raw edge carries over into the lead single, “Highs and Lows,” but the arrangement opens up to really fill out the emotional space. It’s constructed sequentially—guitar first, then drums layered on top, then keyboards—before it all takes off together in a single explosion of feeling. Taking center stage is the synthesizer, WONPIL’s main instrument. After the first time through the chorus, the razor-edged synth picks up the debris from the explosion, tracing the turbulence of all that despair, and a sound like a siren stirs up the dust in a reminder of the song’s title. The effect is emphasized by the lyrics that go from devising a way to survive to simply resigning to fate.

Once “Already Grown Up” comes on, the genre shifts. A scratching sound over a boom bap beat signals a shift to hip hop. But this isn’t just the stylistic detour of a pop rock musician branching out into new territory. The genre is one he’s loved since way back when, the lyrics evoke childhood, and the two fuse together in a way that gives you a sense of where Kim Wonpil came from and where he’s been. The neo-soul-flavored “Up All Night,” with its Latin-inflected guitar front and center, moves into unfamiliar territory, describing a situation thick with subtle tension.

“Step by Step” keeps the mood light throughout even as all the instruments shift and surge, while “Hold My Love” layers brass over a funky sound that calls to mind 1980s R&B. In both cases, the individual instruments move freely while building out the cheery melody, but every one of them slots precisely into place to bring that vibe to life. The rhythmic guitar is anchored by heavy drums, the brass runs alongside the beat to drive it even harder, and keys fill the little gaps in between. The closer “Piano” sounds comparatively sparse as a result, but that’s exactly the right call for drawing out the longing and melancholy to their fullest. Some things only come into focus when you strip everything else away.

DAY6’s music has always been about connecting with the outside world—reaching out to someone, picturing the future, even expressing longing for an ex in roundabout ways. “Unpiltered,” though, turns inward, looking the most private of feelings dead in the eye and capturing the raw shape of emotion exactly as it is, direct and unfiltered. WONPIL takes the sounds from his heart he’s kept locked away and gives them form through music, inviting us all into a world where that heartbeat is able to be heard at last.