I'VE MINE

The record

I’VE MINE is IVE’s first mini album, released on 13 October 2023, six months after the first full-length album I’ve IVE. It carries six tracks and three title tracks: ‘Off The Record’, ‘Baddie’ and ‘Either Way’. Starship Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs assigns each of the three a way of looking at the self — as others see it, as the members find it in one another, and as one finds it alone. The same text credits BIG Naughty with part of the lyrics of ‘Baddie’.

Reviews

IZM’s Han Sung-hyun read the mini album as a turn away from the records before it. Han wrote that “what can be guessed at is a wariness of hardening into an image built on fierce high notes and a clear melody line, and, in step with that, an intention to benchmark the other contenders and sound out the response of markets abroad”, and that “having built a firm territory in vivid RGB, the next turn can only be to fill in the empty parts of the Venn diagram”. Of the six tracks, the one Han called “the most interesting case” is ‘Off the record’.

NME’s Crystal Bell ran an album review on the day of release. She wrote that “the project is slightly more subdued than its predecessors, toying with more grounded themes of identity and self-perception across its six compositions”, and that “the EP largely embodies this idea, serving as a versatile showcase of IVE’s many facets”. The sentence she put on the record as a whole is this: “There’s an acute sense of growth and girlishness that permeates ‘I’VE MINE’.”

Among the tracks

‘Either Way’ is the pre-release IZM reviewed as a single. Lim Dong-yeop introduced it as “IVE’s pre-release single, in which they accept and take in the opposite sides of themselves without minding how others look”, and wrote that it “touches the ‘narcissism’ of ‘Love dive’, the song that made 2022 impossible not to fall for them in”. Lim set the relation between the two out as “if the first is ‘acceptance’, the second is ‘love’ — in content it is a prequel of a record, arriving a year on”, and added that “the musical style walks a road entirely apart from the danceable image the team had”. Bell put the same song at the centre of the record, writing that “on contemplative lead single ‘Either Way’ — one of the mini-album’s three distinct focus tracks — they confront their prismatic personae over moody melodies and soothing synth pads”.

‘Baddie’ is the track Bell read through its rap. She wrote that “the bass-boosted trap single finally allows rapper Rei to flex her seamless flow while giving Gaeul her own space to shine as a dynamic rapper and performer”.

‘OTT’ is the song Jang Wonyoung wrote alone. Bell wrote that “‘OTT’ demonstrates Jang Wonyoung’s growing songwriting prowess”, and that “she’s credited as the sole lyricist of this dreamy dollop of R&B confection”. Of ‘Holy Moly’ she wrote that it “evokes the snappy percussive instrumental of IVE’s debut single, ‘Eleven’”, and reported that the songwriter Lauren Aquilina, who worked on both tracks in the same session, called them sister songs. Of the closing track she wrote that “ending on a more buoyant note, ‘Payback’ displays the more cheerful and bouncy side of IVE’s kaleidoscopic image, leaning more high teen than chaebol crush”.

What came after

The video for ‘Baddie’ went up on the label’s official STARSHIP channel on release day. ‘Either Way’ had gone up on the same channel on 25 September 2023 and ‘Off The Record’ on 6 October. Six months later came the second mini album IVE SWITCH.