After leaving her old company Blockberry Creative, Yves spent a few months looking for a new home and became the last Loona member to re-debut in the industry. Straight after finding her company, Yves announced her EP ‘Loop’ featuring four songs: Diorama, Loop feat Lil Cherry, Afterglow and Goldfish.
With this album, Yves clearly wanted to experiment with her sound. Dipping into multiple genres, she explores Pop, R&B, House, and Rock, closing with an acoustic feel; making at least one song perfect for its genre’s listeners. Loop feels like the perfect start for her career, almost like an epilogue; where she shows her range and abilities and teases fans for what her biggest release will sound like.
Diorama is, personally, the best song on the album. The drums and the flute-like synth start this album, taking us back to older R&B days. Despite this, it sounds fresh for its time. The seductive guitar line enters and leaves smoothly giving the perfect Yves’s breathy tone that fits perfectly in the song. She moves from English to a few Korean lines and talks about a complicated relationship she seems dependent on.
Loop is the single of the EP, and has now gathered almost two million streams on Spotify. It opens with house vocal chops and moves to Yves’s vocals on a soft keyboard. Loop is a very good song but Lil Cherry’s feature is surprising. Although it feels fun to have a rapper featured, her lyrics are very nonsensical and take away the attention from what could have been the perfect house song. Still, the rap brings something new to the track and is used unexpectedly. Lil Cherry comes in the breakdown of the song, which happens early on, as well as just before the pre-chorus. The fusion between house and rap creates excitement for everything else Yves is going to bring.
Yves participated in writing the third track, Afterglow. The guitar is the most important part of the song. Yves sings about the loss of a love, conflicted with letting it go. It combines with Yves’s soft emotional voice and the electric guitar, giving the listener the feel of loss she is trying to portray. Watching her perform it live made the song grow on me. Yves is clearly doing what she is meant to.
The album finishes with Goldfish, a bittersweet song that discusses the need to be there for someone else. Yves’s voice sounds the most beautiful in this track. The emotion is potent and her deep tone rings different from everything else she had shown in Loona. She portrays incredibly the emotions of the song, and we hope we can see more like this from her.
Overall, the EP left wanting more. The songs felt disconnected from each other, but made to show her potential in different areas. It felt like Loop was just a start to show all of Yves’s versatility that will come in full power once her full album is released.
7/10
