strawberry moon

The song

‘strawberry moon’ is a digital single by IU, released on 19 October 2021. It is a one-song release, and the first new song after her fifth full-length album LILAC that March.

The album introduction on Bugs says she wanted the song to call up what happens inside a person who has fallen in love. It says the first sketch was an easy-listening track built on acoustic guitar, and that it became pop rock led by a piano line. The music video was uploaded to the 1theK (원더케이) channel a day earlier, on 18 October 2021.

Reviews

IZM’s Jang Jun-hwan reviewed the single in October 2021 and opened by calling it a victory of the lyric, entirely. He wrote that “the familiar piano-led opening and the plain four-part shape of the writing could be called the most average model of IU’s early music, but a lyric that stands out with real intelligence gave it its difference”. On how the arrangement carries the words, the same piece said that “the background sound, which steps back and is quietly absorbed, changes as flexibly as an equaliser and optimises the ring of the lyric moment by moment, alongside the soft poetic sentences and her own particular figures of speech”.

Jang pointed to two places in the song. The first is the sound that “turns into a vacuum in an instant” as the line about a feeling rising through a taut darkness arrives; the second is the highlight that follows. He wrote that lyrics such as “one big scoop of a strawberry moon” and a witty inversion of the verb for crossing the wind “make the dreamlike scene the song intends vividly concrete and invite a synaesthetic experience”.

Idology (아이돌로지) took up the song in its Monthly singles column for October 2021, published on 17 November. Erin divided IU’s love songs since she began producing into two kinds, then wrote that “‘strawberry moon’ focuses on the fullness that the feeling of love itself calls up”. The same piece said that “the line asking how life could ever be perfect carries a change in IU the lyricist’s view of life inside it, and maximises that full feeling of love”.

NME’s Tanu I. Raj gave the song four stars out of five on 22 October 2021 and wrote that “‘Strawberry Moon’ depicts the kind of easy, mature love that is unaffected by the whimsies of the heart or life, or even power dynamics”. On the arrangement she wrote that “the playful piano segues into atmospheric beats on the pre-chorus, augmented by the reverberating effects put on her voice, as if with every word, she defies gravity and reaches a little higher”.

Afterwards

The mini album Pieces, which gathers songs she had kept aside, followed two months later on 29 December 2021, and the next release after that was the sixth mini album The Winning on 20 February 2024.