IVE EMPATHY

The record

IVE EMPATHY is IVE’s third mini album, released on 3 February 2025, nine months after the second mini album IVE SWITCH. It carries six tracks and two title tracks: ‘REBEL HEART’, which had come out on 13 January, and ‘ATTITUDE’. Starship Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs describes ‘REBEL HEART’ as a song about people with different histories walking together. The same text says ‘ATTITUDE’ samples Suzanne Vega’s ‘Tom’s Diner’ and credits Jang Wonyoung with part of its lyrics.

Reviews

IZM’s Jung Ki-yeop read the mini album as adding one thing to a subject the team has held for years. Jung wrote that “a frank, spirited self-love was the single concept IVE put forward across their whole career”, and that “this record, which lays acceptance over it and carries empathy as its keyword, is the group’s new step up”. Jung went on: “The ‘we’ sung on ‘Rebel heart’, held out at the front, arrives in a colour unlike the earlier ones and became a positive opening shot.” Jung added that “where the ‘we’ spoken of in ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Off the record’ stopped at a word for the six of IVE, this time it holds out a sense of solidarity that takes in the listener too”. The sentence Jung put on the group’s work with borrowed material is this: “The repeated attempts at sampling and re-reading have paid off.”

Randy, writing for the K-pop criticism webzine Idology, placed ‘REBEL HEART’ among its 20 songs of the year for 2025 and began with the wave of band covers the song set off. Randy wrote that “for a while the so-called band challenge that ‘REBEL HEART’ brought on was a pleasure”, and that “what made this ‘grand unification’ possible was, above all, the force of the song itself”. The sentence Randy summed the song up with is this: “It was a good song — pop rock in a straightforwardly bracing arrangement, with lyrics about girls going forward without fear, and completed at last by IVE’s singing, which one cannot help but love.”

Among the tracks

‘REBEL HEART’ is the pre-release title track IZM reviewed as a single. Yeom Dong-gyo wrote that “from an opening that begins on quiet picking through to the electric guitar running all the way and a rousing marching-band rhythm, the rock texture stands out”, and that “the middle and later stretches lay a modern hip-hop method over it, but overall it realises a pop rock several generations can enjoy together”. Of the lyrics Yeom wrote that “IVE never drive their defiance into exclusivism or an antisocial feeling”.

‘You Wanna Cry’ and ‘FLU’ are the two tracks Jung picked out from the record. Jung wrote that ‘You Wanna Cry’ “succeeds at a flavour of its own by folding the melody of Whitney Houston’s ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ into a quiet modern rock”, and that “‘Flu’, an ordinary love song outside the logic of me and you, helps to the easiest listening on the album”. Setting the two side by side Jung wrote that “if ‘You wanna cry’ diluted pessimism into optimism, ‘Flu’ lights up a troubled heart again with a lively guitar riff and vocals pitched agreeably together”, and added that “it was when the concept did not bind them that the colour they have of their own came through most clearly”.

Numbers

Idology placed ‘REBEL HEART’ among its 20 songs of the year in its 2025 round-up. In the 20 albums of the year from the same round-up it published 11 records that did not make the final list as honourable mentions, and this record is on that list.

What came after

The video for ‘ATTITUDE’ went up on the label’s official STARSHIP channel on release day, and the video for ‘REBEL HEART’ had gone up on the same channel on 13 January 2025. Six months later came the fourth mini album IVE SECRET.