Last Fantasy

The record

Last Fantasy is IU’s second full-length album, released on 29 November 2011 with 13 tracks. The title track is ‘YOU&I’. It came two years after the first full-length album, Growing Up.

The album introduction on Bugs says the title means the thoughts, imaginings and fantasies held by someone standing at the end of her teens and looking at the start of her twenties. By the same text Cho Young-chul was executive producer, and Kim Kwang-jin, Yoon Sang, Jung Jae-hyung, Lee Juck, Kim Hyung-suk, Jung Suk-won, Kim Hyun-chul, Yoon Jong-shin, Lee Min-soo, Corinne Bailey Rae, G.Gorilla and Ra.D all worked on the record. The same text notes that beyond the songs she composed herself, she wrote words for several others.

Reviews

IZM reviewed the album in December 2011. Of the opening track Hwang Sun-eop wrote that “‘Secret’, a big ballad in the typical Jung Suk-won manner, has Kim Eana’s fine-grained lyric and a grand chorus work that cuts in exactly where it should, and between them they push the theme of a girl’s unspoken love as far as it will go and help make the strongest first impression”.

The same piece singled out the third track, written by Kim Kwang-jin. “On ‘Holding A Star In My Heart’ a natural vocal with the technique taken out meets a lyrical melody,” he wrote, “and it gives off a plain beauty, as though she were telling a story that is really her own.” That the record gathered musicians from different generations in one place is another point the piece makes.

Among the tracks

The title track, ‘YOU&I’, reunited Lee Min-soo and Kim Eana, who made ‘Good Day’. The album introduction describes its concept as a teenage girl travelling in time and meeting a distant future, and points to an arrangement that crosses between minor and major keys and reaches for instruments rarely heard in Korean pop, such as harp and horn.

Mimyo of Idology (아이돌로지) placed the song at the top of one branch in a column of 30 May 2017 that sorted the ways idol songs handle time. He wrote that “IU takes time as her subject in song after song, and ‘YOU&I’ — which says it will travel through time if that is what it takes to reach a love — stands at the summit of that”.

The second track, ‘Sleeping Prince’, is Yoon Sang’s, and the sixth, ‘Uncle’, was finished in conversation with Lee Juck, who takes the rap on it, the album introduction says. The seventh, ‘Wisdom Tooth’, is G.Gorilla’s, with a lyric about the pain of a first love that the same text says IU co-wrote.

Afterwards

The single The Spring of Twenty followed six months later, on 11 May 2012, and the third full-length album Modern Times came in October 2013.