PAIX PER MIL
Discover Blogly is The FADER’s curated roundup of our favorite new music discoveries.
If you were online during a specific pocket of pop standom in 2018-2019, you might be familiar with the phrase “stan LOONA.” It was a comment that you’d likely stumble across under pretty much any sort of pop-adjacent media posted to Twitter or Instagram regardless of its content. A Taylor Swift clip? “Stan LOONA.” A tweet about the NBA? “Stan LOONA.” A random post or Instagram that wasn’t about music at all and had simply gone semi-viral? Well, you’d better “stan LOONA.”
Perhaps the fans behind the meme were a bit overzealous, but their enthusiasm for LOONA was well warranted. At the time, the 12-member K-pop girl group who debuted in 2016 had built one of the most prolific and diverse catalogs in K-pop, infusing their bubbly, colorful essence into genres like synth-pop, hip-hop, future bass, EDM, early hyperpop — you name it, they’d probably tried it. In 2023, a highly publicized dispute with their label, Blackberry Creative, led to the band effectively breaking up. Since then, its members have re-signed to different agencies and have started releasing music again either solo or in different configurations: Odd Eye Circle, ARTMS, Loosemble, Chuu, and more.
One of those members is Yves, who on November 14 released a debut solo EP of songs that seem to have inherited LOONA’s adventurous and experimental streak. I was put on by a friend who sent me a link to her single “Viola” along with the message, “I wonder what kind of influence Brat will have on K-pop.” A measured assessment of the track, as it turns out, with sleek synths, cavernous clangs, and Yves singing about needing space in a glorious, digitally processed falsetto. The song certainly draws heavily from the SOPHIE/PC Music/Charli XCX handbook of pop, but Yves doesn’t come across as a simple imitator. A watch of its equally slick, concept-driven music video and it’s clear she’s more like a peer, with her own vision to add.
That’s why “Viola” is where the Brat comparison stops when it comes to the rest of Yves’ solo EP, I Did. The three-track run of “Hashtag,” “Gone Girl,” and “Tik Tok,” mozies through slinky R&B funk, laid-back indie-pop, and sticky soul. The stunning closer “Dim” is like pop through the Caroline Polachek filter as she yodels and sings over an angelic trap beat, but in the final 30 seconds pivots left into a jungle dance break. She sings the majority of the album in English, which definitely feels like an appeal for broader recognition. Overall, it feels exceptionally thought-out, curated, and decisive about the kind of out-of-the-box vision Yves is bringing to the table.
And really, it makes all the sense in the world that it’s a (former) LOONA member doing this. All of the members of the band, as part of ARTMS, Loosemble, and more, have released interesting projects this year like the ‘00s sparkle of One of a Kind and cosmic pop of Dall. Maybe it’s time to bring “stan LOONA” back.
