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Yves is pop’s ascendant experimental cool girl with a rebellious streak. You wouldn’t know it immediately – when meets her at her label’s office in Seoul in early April, she’s soft-spoken, almost shy; “I’m nervous,” she shares through a smile early on in our two hours together. But if you look closer at her and her work, you’ll find plenty of subtle defiance and a willingness to, as she puts it, “break the mould”.
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NME
Right now, the 29-year-old is in the early years of her second artistic life – one that’s driven by her desire to do exactly what she wants, but is also, in part, a reaction to the system she had to participate in during her first, as one-twelfth of the K-pop girl group LOONA. Their seven-year run – defined by a sound that was both dreamy and empowering, cult appeal (captured in a collaboration with Grimes) and passionate fandom – came to a tumultuous end in 2023 when they succeeded in terminating their contracts with their then-label BlockBerry Creative. Most of the members went on to re-debut in new groups, as part of either LOOSSEMBLE or ARTMS. Yves, though, chose to go it alone. Instead of finding an established K-pop label to call her home, she veered into uncharted territory by signing to Paix Per Mil, the independent label founded by Korean hip-hop and R&B producer Millic.
Yves on The Cover of NME. Credit: Wonyoung Ki for NME
“I wanted to make the music that I want and be able to share that with the rest of the world,” she tells NME, sitting in a swivel chair, a blue LA Dodgers baseball cap – its side adorned with her logo of a red apple, a fruit she’s long associated with rebellion – pulled down low over her face. “I feel like I owe that to myself – to be able to keep trying what I want to do and keep discovering that.” The members of LOONA were encouraged to write their own songs and were given practice rooms to work from, but Yves found there was little opportunity for the results to be released. “As it is with the usual K-pop pattern, the company would pick the concept and the song and give it to the group,” she explains. “So most of the time, we would just receive songs. It was a one-way path.”
So far, doing what she wants – and defying expectations – has paid off for Yves. Her fourth and latest EP ‘Nail’ cements her reputation as a versatile artist who can turn her hand to any genre, with hyperpop and house, pop-punk and indie already in her repertoire. Eschewing K-pop’s trends and moods to follow her own vision has earned her critical acclaim (including back-to-back spots on NME’s lists of the best K-pop songs of 2024 and 2025) and the respect of other artists. PinkPantheress jumped on 2025’s hyperpop-adjacent ‘Soap’ before inviting her on the remix of ‘Stars’, while past NME Cover star Underscores asked Yves to remix ‘Do It’ earlier this year.
Credit: Wonyoung Ki for NME
After Yves signed with Paix Per Mil in 2024, she remarked to NME that the “company never had an idol” on its roster. In the two years since, though, her image has subtly shifted from that of a typical K-pop idol to an artist separate from the scene. In her view, though, she’s not the only one that’s happened to. “The last time we talked, the differentiation between idol and artist was a lot clearer,” she reasons, something she feels is no longer the case.
“There’s a lot of idols who will be part of the creative process or do a lot of songwriting. For me, it’s not really important whether I’m an idol or an artist, but more that I’m a person who has, compared to back then, a wider music spectrum and is working to create bigger things.” Categorisation is something she shrugs off on all levels. Online, fans use different labels to define her music: K-pop, indie, electronic. To Yves, that’s not the point.
“I’m trying to put out the music that feels right to me and the best music that it can be,” she explains. “In K-pop in general, it’s evolved so much that it’s very hard to strictly define and find those lines. I know people are very comfortable when things are more black and white, but I just hope they think of me as just an artist, or just Yves. I don’t want any one genre to define who I am.” As she happily notes, though, her musical spectrum has expanded since signing to Paix Per Mil, her readiness to explore new sounds reflective of her enormous passion for music. “Music isn’t just a big part of my life – it’s basically become what my life is,” she says.
“It’s not really important whether I’m an idol or an artist, but that I’m a person who has a wider music spectrum and is working to create bigger things”
Even when she was a child growing up in the coastal city of Busan as Ha Soo-young, music occupied a lot of Yves’ time. She and her older sister (who is also now a songwriter and producer called Min!n) would spend hours entertaining themselves with Korean music shows while their parents were at work. “We would sing along to the people on TV and even print out lyrics and do our own little concerts to each other,” Yves recalls. “I feel like that’s how I came to love music and be able to find the enjoyment of what music can be.”
She decided early on that she wanted to be a singer, but her mother wasn’t so keen. “There’s this big memory I have from when I was little where I had a conversation with my mum where I was in my school uniform, crying,” Yves smiles. “I said, ‘If I don’t become a singer, then there’s nothing else that I want to do.’”
Credit: Wonyoung Ki for NME
By the time of that tearful conversation, the budding artist had already been skipping English classes and extra study sessions after school, using the time to burn CDs to submit for auditions. When she got invited to meet with labels, “I would ride the bus to Seoul to go to [them], and then come back without my mum knowing,” she recalls, that rebellious spirit shining through again. “That’s how passionate I was at the time. When I’m looking back on those moments, I think that if I didn’t have such a strong desire and love for music and becoming a singer back then, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
Daring to follow her own beat is in Yves’ DNA. Despite her mum’s resistance, she was very much like her daughter. “I discovered later that, when my mum was younger, she bought a guitar behind my grandmother’s back and would work on her own music,” she shares, lighting up. Her dad, who died when she was young, was part of that headstrong mix. “From what I’ve heard, he was a very ‘my way’ type of guy, and I feel like that’s really come out through me.”
Credit: Wonyoung Ki for NME
While Yves’ solo work is a collaborative process with her label, she’s steered its direction from the start. She often shares PowerPoints with her label of styling and visual references to help build up the concepts of each release – the one for ‘Nail’ centred around the theme of a club, and Yves is “proud” to have seen her ideas come to life in her and her dancers’ performance outfits. In the studio, she works closely with the producer IOAH, crafting projects that tell her story with intention.
The first Yves EP, ‘Loop’, captured her journey of breaking free from the cycles of the K-pop system she’d previously been tied to. Its follow-up, ‘I Did’, was about Yves finding peace in her solo career, and enjoyed an unexpected viral success in ‘Dim’, TikTok creators using its beat-driven instrumental finale to soundtrack the moment before an unforeseen or unfortunate event. It was used in over 400,000 videos on the platform – including one posted by ABBA – and hit Number One on its Viral 50 chart. ‘Dim’ unexpectedly skyrocketing was “a fascinating experience” for Yves, but also somewhat of a double-edged sword. “Through that, a lot of people basically thought, ‘Wow, you’ve made it!’” she recalls. “But personally, I feel like there’s still so much that I want to show and that I’m not completely the artist or person I want to be just yet.”
“Music isn’t just a big part of my life – it’s basically become what my life is”
The “inner conflict” she felt from ‘Dim’’s success fed into ‘Soap’ and her third EP ‘Soft Error’. “From a literal standpoint, if you use soap, it shows what’s really underneath,” she explains. “I tried to use that meaning to really show who I am, rather than what other people think of me.” The song samples ‘Sugar Water Cyanide’ by Rebecca Black, another artist who shed one musical life to embark on new adventures.
And now, ‘Nail’ marks a “turning point” for the rising soloist. She earned her first writing credit in her solo discography on ‘Soft Error’’s ‘Ex Machina’, and now this record is packed with Yves co-writes. Bouncing from house to alternative R&B and alt-pop with ease and low-slung allure, it captures in a non-linear way “a life cycle from birth to death and then beyond that” – exploring themes that, in Yves’ opinion, are common if not deeply explored in K-pop. “I took the challenge to go deeper than what was being represented [elsewhere].” The Lolo Zouaï-featuring title track, for instance, plays on the similar pronunciations of “nail” in English and “tomorrow” in Korean to create an ode to letting go and liberating yourself from worries about both the past and the future.
The EP’s closer, ‘Birth’, though, is perhaps the strongest indicator of where Yves is at right now. “Be born again,” she whispers between bubbling electronics. “Be born in your own light.” It’s a direct nod to the rebirth she’s been through since leaving LOONA and starting out anew on her own. “You can always start again,” Yves affirms. “There’s always another chance.”
Yves’ ‘Nail’ EP is out now via Paix Per Mil.
Listen to Yves’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Rhian Daly
Photography: Wonyoung Ki
Styling: Team IBAEKILHO, Kim Jieun
Styling assistance: Kim Junha, Kim Jaesoon
Hair: Yoonji Son
Makeup: Oh Seongseok
Label: Paix Per Mil
