TEEN VOGUE: (G)I-DLE Is Taking Their “Tumultuous” Journey in Stride
“If we only had ups, we wouldn’t be this strong and we wouldn’t have been able to create what we have. I think these downs allow us to get to higher places.”
“Excuse me where's the G??” replied a bewildered fan on Twitter in late February, two minutes after (G)I-DLE’s account announced their return to music. The accompanying poster was a hot pink punch to the guts, the proclamation of “I Never Die” emblazoned in the middle of crosshairs and, above it, the band’s name printed as “( )I-DLE.” The now-missing “G” stands for girl, in keeping with the Korean spelling, (여자)아이들 (yeoja aideul, meaning “girl idol”). But since debuting in 2018, they’ve introduced themselves sans the qualifying noun, simply positioning themselves as idols, artists, writers, producers, rather than being considered with gender bias. Not everyone has understood or accepted this.
So they doubled down. They stripped the parenthesis’ content, chanting “It’s neither man nor woman, just me I-DLE” on their latest single, “Tomboy,” to make their loudest statement yet. “What we want to convey,” leader Soyeon tells Teen Vogue, "is that we don’t attribute our actions to gender or age. Because I’m me is why I am, and why I act the way I do.”
The self-producing, multinational group have never shied away from their internal complexities nor those created by the high-pressure environment in which they exist. And Soyeon, Miyeon, Minnie, Yuqi, and Shuhua are smart with their work: You can, of course, consume it merely as well-crafted pop - lavish music videos, canny hooks and wordplay, a myriad of sonic moods and colors - or lean into their intricacies and musings around vulnerability (“Maybe”), self-worth (“Oh My God”), and power structures (“Lion”).
Their creative vision is all-encompassing; even their initial comeback announcement (February 23) and album release date (March 14) aligned with the group’s ongoing lyrical themes of escaping an emotional winter to bloom anew in the spring. The album’s trailer, narrated by Minnie, is sinuous with defiance - “I never say goodbye, I never stop, I never cry, I never lose, I never die” - a reply to 2021’s EP 'I Burn', on which the protagonists emerge from a shattered relationship, bloody shards still in hand.
“The name of this album, I Never Die, was already decided when the last EP was almost done being written and we agreed that we wanted this to be a full length album,” notes Soyeon, who does much of the talking over this Zoom call but frequently casts her eye over the members, seeking their consensus. “Actually, we were writing the title song when we were still doing I Burn but we threw that away and started from scratch. We took on a completely different perspective for ‘Tomboy,’ it was the first time thinking and writing as five and not six.”
She says this matter-of-factly, although a collective stillness drapes across the room. Perhaps this is the best way for it to be done. Let’s just rip the band-aid off.
In March 2021, (G)I-DLE member Soojin faced allegations of bullying by a former classmate, and she was placed on hiatus while the matter was investigated. The timing of the initial accusation arrived during a swath of similar cases that cut through South Korea’s entertainment industry, sparking public anger. In August, Soojin officially withdrew from the group, and in early March 2022 her contract with the label was terminated. Rather than make a comeback as (G)I-DLE last year, the remaining members shifted towards solo projects - music, acting, MC’ing, mentoring. Not including an already-recorded single as six members in partnership with fandom platform, Universe, I Never Die is their first group record in 14 long, unsure months.
That’s why everything around it - the title, the trailers, the concept artwork, the six balloons sailing into the night sky in the video for “Tomboy” - feels so poignant, so in need of decoding by a fandom who were shell-shocked by the events of the past year. The album’s name, says Soyeon, “is just part of our (G)I-DLE universe.” Although their worldview is one that’s rarely wavered, forged in the fires of independence and formidable talent, the phrase provides both ammunition and shield for a group whose time-out gave rise to unfettered speculation and ghoulish clickbait commentary.
Lineup changes, and the reasons for them, tend to get shoved under the rug where they become a rather obvious lump, the elephant in the room that no one can publicly talk about. “We had a lot go down in 2021, it was a rough time,” Soyeon says, reflecting from the one vantage point available to her - the aftermath. Minnie, Yuqi, and Shuhua returned to their respective homelands but they all stayed “in constant communication through FaceTime. We made conscious efforts to keep our hearts together,” Soyeon adds. “We frequently said that we wanted to hurry up and release an album together. During our time apart, each member was able to do what they’d been wanting to do but also felt how precious (G)I-DLE is.”
Ever the storyteller, Soyeon sought to make sense of what had happened through a narrative mirror. “While we were going through everything,” she explains, “we thought that in a novel or a comic book, the main character meets obstacles and needs to go away for a period of time. The character grows and is able to come back and triumphantly overcome them. So, like those characters, we also had to go through a hiatus where we were able to grow, and we decided we must release the album to show the public that (G)I-DLE were able to overcome.”
They returned with a bang, quite literally; in the video for new single “Tomboy,” a cherry-red Jaguar explodes in a wall of flame as Miyeon strides towards the camera. There’s knife-throwing in the kitchen, pink revolvers in the bedroom, and a kidnapping created artfully using stop-motion animation. Visually it lands somewhere between pop art, Spring Breakers, and Quentin Tarantino neo-noir. “I quite like his movies and Tarantino often portrays women heroines as anti-heroes, so I also wanted our members to also have characters like those in his films,” says Soyeon. “I was thinking of a character that embodies both heroic and villain characteristics. To some, we can be villains while others could consider us heroes.”
It’s an idea also explored on the B-side “Villain Dies,” where they declare “Heroine is mine, I’ll never die / Who is the villain, that villain is me” and, as with many of their lyrics, it doesn’t stray too far from their reality. “I don’t think we can make everyone love us, it’s normal to have someone that loves us and someone who won’t like us,” says Minnie. However, (G)I-DLE are not oblivious to feedback, they’re still growing as artists after all, and only four years into their careers. “For me, personally, I just embrace all opinions because I think that everyone has things they lack in,” Miyeon says. “I compile what’s been pointed out and work to grow in those areas.”
Where they refuse to concede ground is their artistic autonomy or even the questioning of its existence. Their “tomboy” isn’t just a visual aesthetic, but someone who embraces activities more traditionally associated with men. In February, Soyeon told Marie Claire Korea, “Before debuting, it was rare for female idols to learn composition, so when I said I wanted to compose and produce, everyone thought it was strange… When talking about idols and producers like GD and Zico, they said, ‘They are men.’ Whenever I heard this, I wondered, 'What does that matter?'”
Soyeon recently finished a mentoring stint on the talent survival show My Teenage Girl, where she refused to let the girls on her team not find their full potential. She berated the audience for voting looks over talent, and tasked contestants with writing their own lyrics. On I Never Die Soyeon, Minnie, and Yuqi are the primary songwriters and lyricists; they buck K-pop’s current sounds for the international pop punk revival, an admiring, timely nod to one of Soyeon’s role models, Avril Lavigne. Yuqi’s guitar-heavy composition, “Liar,” takes aim at the idea of the group finding a little niche and sticking to it. “People might call me a liar when they find out that I, us, change a little bit, like, ‘Why are they doing something different than before?’” Yuqi says. “I just wanna say [to them], you think I’m a liar but actually I always was that person, I am who I am. I didn’t lie to anybody ‘cos I didn’t want to show off all of my personality or abilities. You just didn’t know me before. I’m a shining diamond but you didn’t know it.”
In the early days of (G)I-DLE, the goal was to stay true to themselves and stand out, a goal they’ve unarguably achieved. Whether or not they were also privately wanting to blaze a trail, it’s now precisely where their ambitions lie. Their desire is to constantly evolve and push past barriers as “a girl group and a K-pop group,” says Soyeon. “We want to break the general distinction that people make about artists and idols.”
Despite K-pop’s vast expansion culturally in recent years, the industry is still regarded by many as a sonic monolith. For (G)I-DLE, this is a frustrating, easily disprovable crux. It can be an uphill battle, and sometimes it’s just easier to block it out and place all their focus on music. This is, they agree, when they’re at their happiest and most expressive, an experience that Soyeon calls “a privilege.” Minnie, whose mom didn’t manage to experience her own dream, is constantly thankful for her position in life: “My mom had to do something else but it's not what she loves. She says to me, ‘You’re very lucky to do the things that you love as a job.’”
From childhood they’ve each had their own sense of longing for freedom or at least that intangible, hard to verbalise feeling of wanting more. Miyeon’s parents were, she recalls, “open-minded and supportive of anything I wanted to do,” a stance that both broadened her horizons and affirmed her capacity to explore them. Soyeon and Minnie were both well-behaved kids but when puberty hit, all Minnie wanted to do, she laughs, “was play. Then I came back to my senses in high school and studied hard.” Shuhua’s grandfather, she says, “was very strict about my studies, so I wanted to be free once I got older.” And while Yuqi was happy as a young child, she admits her parents “weren’t very open-minded so I received quite a strict education actually. But my personality is really outgoing, I’m talkative and really active, so I kept a good balance between study and play.”
When they debuted, however, their focus was straightforward. “We wanted to do well and knew that we needed to work hard,” Soyeon says. It’s only as they’ve progressed that they’ve gained the assuredness to be free in their work, and that’s come from one source: their fans, known as Neverland. “Our confidence doesn’t come from the fact that we made the music,” Soyeon points out. “We make music because we’re expressing ourselves as artists. The confidence comes from the love our fans give us.”
It was the thought of being reunited with Neverland that quelled racing nerves at January’s Expo Dubai concert, their first in-person show in, Minnie exclaims, “forever!” It was feeling Neverland's support during the show that helped Shuhua, who’d been relentlessly practising to fill Soojin’s parts. “I was really worried because I had new additional lines,” she remembers, grateful that she received “a lot of good feedback.”
As (G)I-DLE embark on the promotional trail for I Never Die, their leader has but one simple wish: “I’d like for people to say that we made an impact with our comeback, that we really were sensational with this album.” She got her wish; “Tomboy” topped 24 iTunes charts, took wins on South Korean music shows, and repeatedly went to no. 1 on South Korea’s many real-time and main charts in the fortnight following its release. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in a career that, by Soyeon’s own admission, hasn’t always run smoothly.
“It’s true that we had a tumultuous journey but I think we grew stronger from it,” Soyeon considers. “If we only had ups, we wouldn’t be this strong and we wouldn’t have been able to create what we have. I think these downs allow us to get to higher places. The creative part of what we do is a big drive but, actually, the five of us being together is our biggest drive.”
source: teenvogue.com
kind of shocked at how easily they talked about going from five members to six? they didn't mention soojin by name but they do talk in fair depth about reorganising and how they decided to do what they did during that period, shuhua talking about having to learn soojin's parts etc