MARK - The Firstfruit - The 1st Album (2025) Hi-Res

The Firstfruit, the debut solo album from NCT rapper MARK, is achingly personal. “After nearly a decade of being an NCT member,” MARK told listeners on his Apple Music 1 radio show on your MARK, “I feel very, very honoured to release a solo album with just my voice, with just my ideas, and just based on me.” Loosely divided into sections based on the four cities—Toronto, NYC, Vancouver and Seoul—the K-pop artist has called home, The Firstfruit tells the story of MARK’s life up until the album's 2025 release.

The 13-track collection begins in Toronto, where the rapper was born and spent the early years of his life. MARK sets the scene in acoustic, spoken-word opener “Toronto’s Window”: “I never thought that I could dream in detail, you know?/Always thought that/All I really had to do was to just be faithful and that’s it.” The artist’s faith is a theme throughout the album. “I was born and raised in a Christian family, and so I would always listen to gospel music,” MARK tells Apple Music, recalling sleeping under his mother’s piano as she played in church. While the album’s title is a reference to its role as his first major solo release, it’s also biblical in nature. “In the Bible, it says the first of the first fruits are considered the most important, and it holds the most significance,” explains MARK.

Falsetto-laced pop-funk track “1999” is the album’s lead single. The song’s title is a reference to MARK’s birth year, but it also evokes the rebirth he feels as a solo artist. “Writing the lyrics for this one was actually really, really hard. I think I had about five drafts,” he says. “The song really focuses on that feeling of being reborn, the subject of rebirth. And you can take it literally, but it’s really just figuratively speaking, like a new understanding.” MARK moved from Toronto to NYC when he was in elementary school, a moment sonically recreated in ambient skit-track “Flight to NYC”. “Righteous” and “Fraktsiya”, a rap collaboration with LEE YOUNG JI, round out the album’s New York chapter.

In “Raincouver”, “Loser” and “Watching TV” (feat. Crush), MARK’s focus moves to Vancouver. “In my heart, I think Vancouver feels the most home to me,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ll kiss the rain drops, oh,” MARK croons in the sentimental, easy-listening track “Raincouver”. He would stay in the city until 2012, when he passed an SM Global Audition and moved to Seoul to become a K-pop trainee. With “+82 Pressin’”, The Firstfruit shifts location for a final time. The confident hip-hop track, which also features MARK’s NCT co-member HAECHAN, is a reference to the country code needed to call South Korea. “200”, “Journey Mercies”, “Mom’s Interlude” and “Too Much” round out The Firstfruit’s Seoul story. “This is the city where my musical journey really begins,” says MARK.