I've IVE

The record

I’ve IVE is IVE’s first full-length album, released on 10 April 2023. It is the first album after a debut year spent on three single albums, and it carries 11 tracks with nothing re-recorded. The title track is ‘I AM’ and the pre-release is ‘Kitsch’, which had come out on 27 March. Starship Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs credits An Yu-jin and Jang Wonyoung with writing the lyrics of three tracks — ‘Heroine’, ‘Mine’ and ‘Shine With Me’ — and Gaeul and Rei with the rap writing. The same text describes ‘Kitsch’ as the song that gathers up the identity of the three single albums before it.

Reviews

IZM’s Han Sung-hyun wrote of the album that “on a fourth-generation idol battlefield where every act insists on its difference, IVE, who shout ‘we are different’ just the same, are paradoxically the closest thing to an orthodox girl group”. Han wrote that “IVE’s aim is retro, but the rewind runs back a shorter way”, and explained that what they restore is not 1980s disco or a Y2K feeling but the memory of the early-to-mid 2010s. Han added that “songs with a sweet or at times breezy air, like ‘Cherish’ and ‘Not your girl’, reinforce that image”, and that the group “walks a balanced tightrope over the complicated qualities of the idols of that era, who had to be objects of longing and familiar presences at once”. On the length Han wrote that “against a minimalist trend that puts quality before quantity, the frontal push of 11 tracks — untidy as it may be — is welcome”, and called the record “in several senses an inheritance of the classical ideal a girl-group title carries”.

Mano, writing for the K-pop criticism webzine Idology in the April 2023 issue of Monthly, its short-notice column on new releases, called it “the group’s first physical album larger than a single, and a landmark first full-length”. Mano wrote that “once ‘Blue Blood’, fierce and grand enough to open a concert, has thrown the doors open, the title song ‘I AM’, armed with a grandeur and a swelling to match, and the casually trendy self-affirmation of the pre-release double title ‘Kitsch’ run on in turn, firming up again the message the team has carried consistently since debut and the name they have held to”, and that “they filled a considerable volume of 11 tracks with new songs alone and no re-recordings, and each song is very sound while the spacing between tracks is apt enough that it is hard to find fault”.

Cho Eun-jae, in the same issue, wrote that “of the many artists leading this generation of K-pop, the one carrying on the line of ‘K-pop as gayo’ is, whatever anyone says, IVE alone”. Cho wrote that the group “gathers up and lays out the elements Korean gayo has traditionally handed down — a melody that runs ornately against an uncomplicated beat, and dramatic sound staging that answers finely tuned lyrics faithfully”, and that “unlike a retro fashion that revisits the style of 20-odd years ago, IVE have reproduced not only that style itself but the very way music was made back then”.

Among the tracks

‘I AM’ is the title track Idology treated apart from the album. Yemi wrote in the singles half of the same April 2023 issue that “‘I AM’ gathers up the inheritance K-pop girl groups have built and puts IVE in the position of its heir”, and that “the song, which opens on a grand sound and runs along the K-pop girl-group cliché everyone knows, calls the previous generation of girl groups to mind once the chorus arrives in a high-register unison”. Yemi’s one-line summary is this: “A song that shows there is history and tradition behind the cliché, and that this is why it carries meaning and force.”

‘Kitsch’ is the pre-release IZM reviewed as a single. Park Su-jin wrote that the song takes the force out of the sound of the three before it, and that “looking at it through the lyrics, that is, the message, the song follows and repeats the existing line of their career exactly”. Park wrote that the lyrics let one “read the bold self-possession of women idols in their teens and twenties today, and read the social-media play culture of the young”, and noted that “the grain of the music differs from what came before, but the message is as it was and the aim is exact”.

‘Shine With Me’ is the track Mano picked out as the album’s close. Mano called it “a moving fan song that cannot help but bring to mind the sight of them singing their hearts out in a wave of glittering light sticks”.

Numbers

Idology placed the album among its 15 albums of the year and ‘I AM’ among its 15 songs of the year in its 2023 round-up. Both pieces run excerpts of the Monthly notices — the album ones by Cho and Mano, the single one by Yemi.

What came after

The video for ‘I AM’ went up on the label’s official STARSHIP channel on release day, and the video for ‘Kitsch’ had gone up on the same channel on 27 March 2023. Six months later came the first mini album I’VE MINE.