Holding the Storm: TXT's 'PERFECT STORM' and Shakespeare's The Tempest

Shakespeare's most famous storm is a storm with a plan. The Tempest opens on a ship breaking apart at sea. One scene later we learn that the exiled duke Prospero raised the weather himself, and that, in his spirit Ariel's report, "Not a hair perished." The storm is not there to destroy anyone. It is there to bring everyone to the island where things can finally change.

TOMORROW X TOGETHER's ninth mini album, PERFECT STORM, out November 16, builds its whole rollout on the same idea. The storm, as IBTimes reports the label's framing, is "a force that disrupts stagnation and creates the possibility of change."

The story so far

The rollout reads like a short play in four scenes. STARNEWS sets out the order. First came trailers and photos under the title STORM IS COMING. Then RIDE THE STORM, in which the five members "boldly entrusted themselves to the fierce winds." Then EYE OF THE STORM, released October 28, which allkpop describes as finding "the calm found in the eye of the storm," the members standing steady while dancers in black move around them like wind.

The last set, HOLDING THE STORM, arrived on October 30. In it, STARNEWS writes, the members hold or set down spheres containing swirling storms, which "depicts the storm that once overwhelmed them as now being small enough to rest on their fingertips."

The music carries the same arc. Korea Daily's track notes describe the opening song, "Storm is…," as declaring "a leap straight into the storm to break through a suffocating reality," and the title track, "Angel Bite," as a love song about wanting to stay beside "you" even in an imperfect youth. According to Korea Daily, the album speaks for Generation Z after "the illusions of their teens," widening the lens of earlier series such as The Dream Chapter and The Name Chapter.

The parallel: a storm that harms no one

Look closely at how Shakespeare stages his tempest. Miranda watches the wreck and is undone: "O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!" Prospero's answer is the turning point of the scene: "Tell your piteous heart / There's no harm done." He then sets aside his magic cloak with four plain words, "Lie there, my art," and tells her the story of who she is.

That is the movement of PERFECT STORM's rollout. Fear first, then immersion, then calm at the centre, then the storm held in a hand. The storm stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you can carry and, eventually, set down. In the Folger Library's summary of the final act, Prospero does exactly that: he "renounces the further use of his magic" and frees Ariel.

Something rich and strange

The play's most famous song is about transformation, not loss. Ariel sings to Ferdinand, who believes his father has drowned:

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

"Hate It or Love It," the album's closing track, makes a similar promise in modern words. Korea Daily reports that it reflects on how "abandoning familiarity for change ultimately reveals the true 'self'." The storm wrecks the familiar ship. What washes up is not less than before. It is rich and strange.

And the love song sits right in the middle of the weather. Shipwrecked and held captive, Ferdinand says he can bear it all, "Might I but through my prison once a day / Behold this maid." "Angel Bite," in Korea Daily's description, expresses "a firm resolve not to let go" of a partner "despite painful circumstances." Four centuries apart, both find the same shelter in a storm: another person.

The album has its own crew of collaborators. Korea Daily reports that Martin, Juhoon and Seonghyeon of CORTIS, the label's newest group, worked on "Angel Bite," while members wrote lyrics across the record: Soobin and Beomgyu on "Touch the Sky," and Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hueningkai on "Hate It or Love It."

ACROSS ASIA

Japanese animation offers a storm story for this generation. Makoto Shinkai's Weathering with You (2019) follows a 16-year-old runaway in a Tokyo where the rain will not stop, and a girl who can clear the sky by praying, at a price. Shinkai has said he was influenced by the effect of climate change on Japan, particularly heavier summer rainfall. Where Prospero calms the storm, Shinkai's young lovers choose each other and let the rain continue, and the film ends with a promise that they will be all right. PERFECT STORM finds a third answer: neither stopping the storm nor surrendering to it, but holding it.

A fresh perspective: the storm as a stage direction

Weather in old plays is a stage direction. "A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard" is how The Tempest begins in the Folger edition, and everything after is the characters learning what the noise was for.

Applause for a rollout that understood this. TXT did not use the storm as decoration. They staged a sequence, coming, riding, standing in the eye, holding, that tells its story before a note of the album is heard, and leaves the songs to say what the storm was for. The full answer arrives on November 16.

Lore & Legend is CURA:TE's series reading artists' officially published worldviews beside the heroes and stories of human history and literature. It is interpretation, not a claim about creators' intentions.