Jackson Wang is on his day off, just after GOT7 — the 7-member K-pop group Jackson performs in as a dancer and rapper — performed a show in Berlin, one of the stops on the group’s Keep Spinning World Tour. Still, he's doing an interview on the phone with Teen Vogue. When I apologize, he’s quick to jump in: “No, no, no, no. It's alright. It's good. I love it,” he says.

And you can tell he means it — he really does love his work. His excitement is most visible when he starts talking about his brand new solo record, Mirrors, which dropped today, Oct. 25. The album has eight songs, including collaborations with American artist GoldLink and Indonesian rapper Rich Brian. The first single “Bullet to the Heart” is a heavy hip-hop slow jam with a catchy electric guitar riff, as Jackson sings in English about a “breathless” and “reckless” love turned painful. The other songs pull in more rap and R&B but with a smooth pop sheen, culminating in a Chinese-language cover of Stephanie Poetri’s Avengers: Endgame-themed viral acoustic pop hit, “I Love You 3000.” Jackson says that on Mirrors, he’s found his “true self at this moment in life.”

Jackson is no stranger to hip-hop and rap — he's one of GOT7's lead rappers and the solo work he's released up until now has been rap-heavy. On this new record, Jackson says he doesn't feel the pressure to box himself into one genre. “I've released a lot of rap music before, a lot of like hip-hop, trappy, stuff. And at the same time I've been on different programs doing covers of other Chinese artists’ songs like, like ballads, like R&B, like pop,” he tells Teen Vogue. “I found myself [being] like, oh, [Mirrors] doesn't have to be all the way in rap. It doesn't have to be all the way in R&B. I found myself in the middle.”

On one single, “D Way!,” Jackson speaks into (hopeful) existence a Rolling Stone magazine cover, and name-checks rock legends like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards before deadpanning, “Fast lane, fast life, never slow down. If you didn’t know before bet you know now.”

That line has come to describe Jackson’s life. Between his GOT7 responsibilities and his solo work, Jackson is literally working double time. Mirrors is released through Jackson’s own company Team Wang, whereas GOT7 is part of the entertainment company JYP, one of the big four K-pop businesses in Korea (alongside SM, YG, and Big Hit — home to BTS). Jackson describes his life right now as split between the two, with six months in his home country of China with Team Wang and six months back in Korea recording or touring internationally with GOT7. “I mean, it's hard at the end of the day, cause when [GOT7] rests, I have to go to do my Team Wang stuff. When Team Wang rests I go back [to GOT7],” he says. “I produce a two-year schedule in one.” This might explain why he picks up the phone for an interview on a day off.

Now 25 years old, Jackson debuted with GOT7 in 2014 when he was 19. Before then, Hong Kong-born Jackson was working on a promising career as a professional athlete; he turned away from the path that would have led him to the London Olympics in fencing, as well as a scholarship to Stanford University, in favor of pursuing training as a musician and performer. He still loves to fence, but he looks back on that time in his life now and is glad he took the risk.