《黯 DARK》SHIERMEN’s Second Reimagine Album

What if the darkest version of you isn't the one you need to escape—but the one you finally need to understand?

We write songs and leave them behind. We grow older. We change. We forget the person who wrote them. Until one day, we hear those songs again, and suddenly, the past doesn't sound so distant anymore. It sounds like us. That is where 《黯 DARK》 begins.

Following HORMONE, 《黯 DARK》 is John Will’s second Reimagine Album—a collection of 10 songs selected from his earlier catalogue and brought back to life through the new artistic identity of Twelve Gates SHIERMEN.

But this is not simply an album of old songs with new arrangements. It is a conversation between who John Will was when these songs were first created and who he has become now.

Looking Back Without Going Back

There is something strange about revisiting your own work. Sometimes you remember exactly what you were feeling when you wrote a song. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes a lyric that once felt dramatic suddenly feels painfully honest. And sometimes, a song you thought was about someone else turns out to have been about yourself all along.《黯 DARK》 lives in that space.

The songs explore parts of life that are not always easy to talk about—depression, fractured identity, pride, emotional conflict, loneliness, and the pressure of trying to become the person the world expects you to be. These are not necessarily comfortable stories. But they are human ones. Rather than hiding the darker parts, "DARK" chooses to look at them.

From Old Songs to New Stories

The original songs came from different moments and different chapters of John Will’s musical journey. For this album, most have been stripped apart, rearranged, reconstructed, and reimagined.

The production is shaped for the live stage—bigger movements, stronger contrasts, contemporary textures, and arrangements designed not only to be heard, but to be experienced. Through Twelve Gates SHIERMEN, these songs become something different. Not replacements for the originals. Not attempts to erase where they came from. Instead, they are conversations with the past.

A song can stay the same on paper and still become a completely different experience when you are no longer the person who wrote it.

Why “DARK”?

The word "黯" carries a sense of darkness, dimness, and something hidden from the light. But "DARK" is not an album about darkness for the sake of "darkness".

It is about what happens when we finally stop running from it. There are moments when we feel lost inside our own minds. Moments when pride becomes a shield. Moments when identity becomes fractured. Moments when society tells us who we should be, while another voice inside asks:

Who am I really?

"DARK" does not try to answer every question. It simply allows the questions to exist. Because sometimes transformation does not begin when everything becomes bright. Sometimes it begins when we finally dare to look into the dark.

The Beginning of Something Else

《黯 DARK》 is a retrospective, but it is not a goodbye to the past. It is a way of taking the past with you—changing its shape, hearing it with new ears, and discovering that the stories you thought were finished may still have something left to say.

Ten songs.

Ten different memories.

One darker perspective.

And perhaps, somewhere inside that darkness, a new beginning.

DARK is not the destination. It is the place where transformation begins. The lights may be low. The memories may still hurt. But sometimes, that is where we finally begin to see.

STORIES WITHIN SONGS. The song is only the beginning.