EXO's Xiumin Returns With 'Interview X' at Baekhyun's INB100: What the Label Move Means

EXO's Xiumin is returning with his second solo mini album. "Interview X" arrives on March 10, 2025 — his first solo project in nearly three years and the first he is releasing through INB100, the label founded by EXO member Baekhyun. The title track "WHEE!" introduces a UK Garage-influenced dance sound that marks a deliberate stylistic shift from his earlier output, while the six-track album includes "Love is U," a track written by fellow EXO member Chen. The release is both a musical comeback and a structural statement: Xiumin's arrival at INB100 represents one more chapter in the ongoing story of EXO members building independent careers outside SM Entertainment.

What Xiumin Is Releasing

"Interview X" contains six tracks with the title song "WHEE!" at its center. The track's UK Garage foundation — a genre built on uptempo rhythms, synthesizer textures, and a specific kind of UK club music energy — positions the release well outside the softer, more atmospheric work that Xiumin's debut solo album explored. UK Garage has filtered into K-pop production at varying levels of authenticity over the past several years, but when a group member with Xiumin's vocal profile brings it to a title track, the implicit argument is about range: that a vocalist trained in a group whose identity spans dramatic ballads and percussive choreography concepts can find genuine expression in a genre rooted in something different.

The remaining four tracks on the album have not been individually previewed before the release date, but the album's six-track structure places it firmly in the range of a focused solo statement rather than a casual single package — there is enough material here for Xiumin to establish a full creative perspective across multiple moods and approaches, which is what a second solo album should accomplish.

The inclusion of "Love is U," written by Chen, continues a pattern within EXO where the group's creative bonds have persisted across the complicated developments that have affected the group's label relationships. Chen and Xiumin contributing to each other's solo work is a form of artistic solidarity that fan communities notice and value — it connects individual solo careers back to the shared history that produced them, maintaining a sense of EXO as a creative collective even when its members are no longer releasing primarily as a group. That Baekhyun's label is releasing Xiumin's album extends that logic from music to business structure: the EXO creative community is actively building the infrastructure around itself.

The INB100 Dimension

INB100 was founded by Baekhyun after his contract with SM Entertainment concluded, and it represents one of the clearest examples in the current K-pop industry of a former idol using accumulated capital — financial, social, and industry-relational — to establish an independent label operation. Baekhyun's own releases through INB100 have demonstrated that the label can manage the logistics of a K-pop solo career at a meaningful scale: production, distribution, album rollout, and promotional presence.

When Xiumin signs with INB100 for "Interview X," he is not simply finding a convenient home. He is joining a structure that one of his closest industry collaborators built specifically to operate outside SM's framework. The significance of that choice becomes clearer when viewed against the broader context of how SM artists from EXO's generation have navigated post-SM careers. Lay remained in China-focused work, Kris and Luhan pursued Chinese entertainment markets, D.O. has focused on acting, and Chanyeol has been building toward his own independent projects. The ones who have leaned most directly into continued K-pop solo output — Baekhyun and now Xiumin — are doing so through structures they control rather than through conventional agency relationships.

EXO's Members in 2025 and What Xiumin's Return Means

It is worth stating explicitly what "Interview X" being released through INB100 does not mean: it does not signal a permanent or official departure from the possibility of EXO as a collective unit. EXO has not formally disbanded, and several members have expressed interest in continued group activity when service obligations and individual schedules allow. What it does signal is that Xiumin, like Baekhyun before him, has decided that his solo creative work is better served by a more directly controlled structure than what a conventional major-agency relationship provides. That is a pragmatic calculation, not a dramatic rupture.

EXO debuted in 2012 and defined much of what the third generation of K-pop meant to international audiences in the years that followed. By 2025, the members are in their thirties, and the question of what EXO as a collective entity means in the fourth-generation era is being answered incrementally through each member's individual choices. Suho has completed military service. Kai continues to release solo work through SM. D.O. has built a film and television career that now exists somewhat independently of K-pop context. Baekhyun and Xiumin are building a label infrastructure together.

Xiumin's "Interview X" arrives against this backdrop as a statement of continued creative investment in K-pop performance — not nostalgia, not a victory lap, but a new project in a new musical direction through a structure built by the group's own members. The title's framing — an interview with oneself, presumably, given the "X" that identifies Xiumin in EXO's naming convention — suggests a reflective but forward-looking orientation. That is exactly what a second solo album at this stage of a long career should be. March 10 will show whether the music itself lives up to the structural significance of how it is being released.