Dust (Joker Xue album)

Dust is the tenth album by Chinese singer-songwriter Joker Xue. It was released digitally on December 27, 2019, by Huayu World Expo and later acquired by Xue's own label Chaoshi Music. The physical album went on presale on May 5, 2020.

Background
The album cover, featuring images of horse and deer in black and red, is a reference to the Chinese idiom "calling a horse a deer" which is used to describe people who deliberately confuse one thing for another and do not distinguish between right and wrong. This is later explored further in songs like "Puppet", "Half a Beat Slower", "Morbidity", "Loop" and more specifically in "Cooperate" through the contradictory lens of criticism and hope, shuttling between reality and ideals.

Of the ten tracks on the album, Xue composed music for six tracks and wrote lyrics for nine tracks. "Express Your Feelings" was created on the variety show Infinite Song Season when Xue was partnered up with Yi Yi in 2018. Xue developed the song further and invited Liu Xijun on the track. On Weibo, Xue posted that the seventh song on an album is to gauge the album's quality and quality control; "after listening to it, you can choose to go back and listen to the six earlier tracks again or delete the album permanently." "Wandering with You" is the seventh track and also the song Xue worked on for the longest, starting from when he adapted "Thousands of Words" by Teresa Teng on the show Mother Like Flowers. Xue later wrote and composed "Wandering With You"; however, he felt it needed a prelude to complete the song and could not write one better than the first four lines "Thousands of Words". After six years, he finally decided to acquire the rights to use the song and rewrote two of the four lines used in "Wandering With You". "Wandering With You" was a success, receiving 100,000 comments online within the first 24 hours and peaking at #3 on Tencent Music UNI Chart. All songs on the album peaked within the top ten spots on Tencent Music UNI chart, with the exception of "Loop" which peaked at 19.

Dust is #1 on Tencent Music's 2019 Year-End Chart which ranks the albums based on the sum of the five highest scored songs on each album while "Puppet and "Half a Beat Slower" were among the Top 20 Songs of the Year and "Puppet", "Mocking", "It's Been So Long", and "Half a Beat Slower" were among the Top 20 Popular Singles of the Year. Xue was named one of the Top 10 Artists of the Year and one of the Top 10 Popular Artists of the Year.