The Winning

The record

The Winning is IU’s sixth mini album, released on 20 February 2024 with five tracks. The third of them, ‘Shh..’, is printed with HYEIN and Joe Won-sun as featured artists and Patti Kim on narration. It came two years and two months after Pieces in December 2021.

The album introduction on Bugs says the opening track ‘Shopper’ is about people who pick what they want by their own measure, and describes it as electro pop rock led by guitar. The fourth track, ‘Love wins all’, had come out a month earlier, on 24 January 2024, as a pre-release single. The video for ‘Shopper’ was uploaded to the 이지금 [IU Official] channel on the day of release.

Reviews

IZM’s Lee Seung-won reviewed the record in February 2024, taking the tracks in order. Of the first he wrote that “the opening track ‘Shopper’ carries on the glittering pop that ‘Lilac’, ‘Blueming’ and ‘Celebrity’ stand for”, and of the second that “the many-sided imagination and irregular vocal construction that shone in ‘Ah puh’ and ‘Jam Jam’ are combined once again at a high level of finish”. On the way the record closes he wrote that “the process of ending, carried on into ‘I stan U’ — early-Taylor-Swift-style pop that calls up a nostalgia for the not-distant past — is natural too”.

NME’s Rhian Daly gave the record four stars out of five on 22 February 2024 and wrote that “like most IU records, ‘The Winning’ is an eclectic but cohesive rush of sounds, veering from ‘Holssi’’s lowkey groove to the bluesy grit of ‘Shh..’”. On what the album is about she wrote: “Dreaming big is a core part of ‘The Winning’, with IU both explicitly urging us to follow our own path and more subtly celebrating what we can achieve together in life throughout.”

Among the tracks

Of the first two tracks Daly wrote that “‘Shopper’ – a crisp piece of aspirational synth-pop – and the fresh, cool ‘Holssi’” are vessels IU uses “to encourage us to chase after our desires, no matter how impossible they seem”.

Three generations of singers appear on the third track, ‘Shh..’. Daly wrote that it “features pioneering female singers from across Korean music history, connecting the dots from the 1950s until now”, and reported that Patti Kim was the first Korean singer to perform in Japan and Las Vegas and that Joe Won-sun was the frontwoman of Roller Coaster. The same piece says NewJeans’ Hyein appears representing the musicians moving K-pop forward now.

The fourth track, ‘Love wins all’, came out first as a single and drew two reviews of its own. IZM’s Yeom Dong-gyo wrote in February 2024 that “the antique piano playing and the string-led orchestration are closely woven into each other, showing the strength of the arrangement, while the pulling chorus and the resolve to push once more past it amplified the emotional line”, and called it “a song that carries the depth to draw quality out of any genre”. Lee wrote of the same song that it “develops the method of ‘Love poem’ by a further degree, and its particular romantic colour and elegant, step-by-step build shine with polish and grace”.

NME’s Daly gave the song a piece of its own on 25 January 2024, writing that “delivered over a whisper of a piano melody and soft, unobtrusive strings, the sweeping, starlit ‘Love Wins All’ is a masterclass of a ballad”. She added: “It makes you feel every ounce of emotion naturally, subtly leading you there through tone and lyricism rather than heavy-handedly signposting how it wants you to feel and react.”

Numbers

NME placed ‘Love wins all’ 17th in “The 25 best K-pop songs of 2024”, published on 11 December 2024. The entry, signed with initials, says that “IU’s cinematic epic of a ballad, ‘Love Wins All’, clung to the belief that was still possible”. The same outlet gave the album four stars out of five.

Afterwards

The third remake album A flower bookmark, Pt. 3 followed on 27 May 2025, and the single Bye, Summer on 10 September that year.