IVE SECRET

The record

IVE SECRET is IVE’s fourth mini album, released on 25 August 2025, six months after the third mini album IVE EMPATHY. It carries six tracks and the title track is ‘XOXZ’. Starship Entertainment’s album introduction on Bugs describes ‘XOXZ’ as a low rap and a vocal harmony over an 808 bass and brass, and says the title stands for a goodnight and a promise to meet in a dream. The same text presents the six tracks as separate pieces of feeling that still read as one sequence.

Reviews

IZM’s Lim Seon-hee read the album as declining to repeat the formula of the hits before it. Lim wrote that “IVE draw a firm X. You can tell from the first two bars”, and that “the minimal hip-hop beat, full of a low register whispered ticklishly close, seems to underline the parting with their long-time partner Ryan Jhun”. Lim added that “the reason this strangeness does not spread into bewilderment is the compromise”, and described that compromise as “covering the sharpness of ‘Baddie’ with a fog-thick ‘Love dive’, repeating tension and release, and repeating it again”.

Real Sound, a Japanese music outlet, took up the album’s opening song in its weekly column on new releases. The writer Ishii called it “a strange song: the low end humming from the start is striking, and the use of the 808 bass seems conscious of a hip-hop classic, yet by the end it is the coolness and the transparency of pop that win out”. Ishii reported that Jang Wonyoung wrote the lyrics and that a multinational team of writers including Diedrik van Elsas and Emma Rosen composed it.

The Korea Times’ Pyo Kyung-min reviewed the record six days after release. Pyo wrote that “in it, the glossy optimism that defined IVE’s image gives way to darker, bass-heavy textures”, and that “the heavier beats inject freshness without turning abrasive, landing somewhere between risk and restraint”.

Among the tracks

‘XOXZ’ is the title track all three outlets took up. Lim wrote of its chorus that “the brass of the chorus, which flows as though the force had been taken out of it and then strikes heavily, plays a large part”. Ishii wrote of the arrangement that “almost no sound comes in besides the beat and the bass, and a minimal harmony is always laid around the singing at the centre”, and that “that is all there is as a structure, and there is no device to draw you in with a violent impact, yet the more you listen the further you are pulled into a depth that does not seem like two and a half minutes”. Pyo wrote that the same song “swaps synth-pop melodies for hip-hop vibes, layering 808 bass lines, drum patterns and verses tinged with rap”, and that “rather than abandon its core ‘self-love’ message, IVE retools it into a darker narrative of transformation”.

What came after

The music video went up on the label’s official STARSHIP channel the same day. Pyo wrote that it “leans into shadowy imagery”.