Taiwanese singer-songwriter OHAN has released his second full-length album, ‘O725,’ a nine-track concept record built around a fictional AI robot learning to feel for the first time. His agency, Kite, announced the release on November 7.
The album puts its imaginary robot front and center. The name ‘O725’ combines OHAN’s initial ‘O’ with his birthday, July 25, and the record follows the robot O725 on a journey through anger and resistance, loss and emptiness, toward love. Across nine tracks, the album asks what weight emotions give to human existence, using a machine that is discovering feelings to hold a mirror up to the people who built it.
OHAN described the idea in a statement carried by Korean media. “I transplanted joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure into a being imprinted with my traces,” he said, adding that he wanted to gaze side by side at “a robot learning emotions and a human accustomed to hiding them.” The contrast is the album’s engine: one side of the pairing is discovering feeling for the first time, while the other has spent years learning to suppress it.
The sound is built from 1990s British alternative rock and the lyricism of Radiohead, filtered through a distinctly Taiwanese sensibility. OHAN co-produced the record with Jon Du, the producer behind Taiwanese band Sunset Rollercoaster’s signature work ‘Soft Storm.’ Together, they set cold electronic tones against rough band sounds, using the collision to make the boundary between human and machine feel three-dimensional rather than theoretical.
The album also reaches across to the Korean indie scene. The track ‘Morrison’s Gifts’ features Kang Heum, vocalist of Korean psychedelic band BØJEONG, a collaboration the Korean report singled out as an example of contemporary Asian pop exchanging ideas across language and borders. It is a fitting guest spot for a record about connection: a Taiwanese singer-songwriter and a Korean psychedelic vocalist meeting on a song about a robot trying to understand emotion.
The concept has already drawn notice outside Korea as well. RouteNote’s Radar, previewing the record, described its nine tracks as imagining O725, the world’s first AI robot to develop feelings, moving through pride, resistance, longing and numbness toward love. The two accounts describe the same arc in slightly different words, but the shape is consistent: a machine passing through the hardest emotions on its way to the one that matters most.
OHAN, whose full name is Wu Chenghan, is also the vocalist and guitarist of Taiwanese band I Mean Us, a role he has held since 2022. With that band he has built a reputation for dark, cool psychedelic rock that digs into the depths of the human interior, and ‘O725’ extends that same fascination into a solo setting. His earlier solo work includes the debut album and the EP ‘REBIRTH,’ along with the recent Mandarin alternative-rock single ‘Before Sunrise,’ which Jon Du also made with him and which served as a preview of the new album’s direction.
The robot-learning-to-feel premise lands at a moment when artificial intelligence is a daily headline, but OHAN’s approach is deliberately human rather than technical. The record is less interested in how a machine might work than in what its first feelings would cost, and the nine tracks treat love not as a program to run but as the end of a long passage through the emotions people usually try to avoid.
The release caps a busy stretch for the songwriter. He appeared on a festival bill at Rock in Taichung on November 1, days before the album’s arrival, and ‘Before Sunrise’ had already introduced listeners to the collaboration with Jon Du that now anchors the full record. ‘O725’ is out now.
