InterviewKwon Eun-bi opens new chapter with 1st single since label move

K-pop singer Kwon Eun-bi has taken to numbering versions of herself. The first one, she said, was spent working out who she actually was. The second one starts Thursday.

"The Kwon Eun-bi at Woollim Entertainment was a time of getting to know myself," the singer said during an interview with The Korea Times at a cafe in Seoul's Gwangjin District, Monday. "Going solo meant having to think hard about who I am, and that was quite difficult at the time. I'd had so little time alone that I hadn't thought about it much."

The second, she said, "feels like a fresh start, finally knowing what I enjoy doing."

Some of what she found was smaller than expected.

"I discovered that I like little things more than I'd expected. Traveling abroad, meeting friends and giving out small gifts," she said. "I was always the older sister, always the leader, so I lived pretending to be that person. Turns out I was more than that."

That leadership role is where most listeners first encountered her. Kwon debuted in 2014 with the short-lived girl group Ye-A, left the following year and signed as a trainee with Woollim Entertainment. She made her name in 2018 on Mnet's audition series "Produce 48," which placed her in project group IZ*ONE as leader. The 12-member group ran until April 2021, and Kwon went solo four months later with the EP "OPEN."

The releases that followed, among them "Glitch" (2022), "Underwater" (2022), and "The Flash" (2023), leaned hard on piercing high notes and intense choreography, and her summer festival appearances, particularly at WATERBOMB, earned her the nicknames "summer queen" and "festival queen."

Asked whether the new single is an attempt to shed that label, Kwon did not entirely dispute the premise.

"It's something to be grateful for, that people think of me when they think of summer. But I prepared this out of a sense that I should be showing something besides that," she said. "It's also fair to say I've been boxed in. I've been thinking I want to prove more through the new album."

She announced her departure from Woollim in March and signed with RBW, home to K-pop acts Mamamoo and Onewe, one month later. The move, she said, came down to the conversations she had before signing.

"They pointed out things I'm capable of, beyond the image the public has of me," she said. "Those conversations landed."

"DEJAVU," out Thursday at 6 p.m., is a breezy, lighthearted disco-pop track and her first new music in about a year and four months. Kwon described the concept as "dreamy and mysterious," a deliberate turn away from the intensity of her earlier work.

"If what I've shown until now has been more intense, this time I've put in a lot of feeling, a lot of dreaminess, a more natural version of myself," she said. Where her older songs were built around high notes, she said, this one asked for attention to "timbre, tone and enunciation."

The choreography follows the same logic, trading props and large formations for something "easy to watch."

She called "DEJAVU" the first work she has started on her own terms, and put her satisfaction with it at 90 percent. The missing tenth, she said, is commercial — she doesn't think her songs have broken through to a general audience.

Asked about a possible IZ*ONE reunion, Kwon said the members had discussed it among themselves after watching the girl group I.O.I reunite.

"There's positive talk going around that we want to, that it would be good. I was envious that they were able to do it," Kwon said. "We talked about whether we might be able to when our 10th anniversary comes," and put the odds at "over 50 percent," while acknowledging that multiple agencies would need to agree for a reunion to happen in 2028.

The 30-year old singer said her ambitions now are mostly about duration.

"Now that I've been doing this a while, I've learned how hard it is to keep working steadily without anything going wrong," Kwon said. "Watching senior artists who've lasted, my biggest goal is to keep working with a healthy mind and body. That seems like the hardest thing of all."

She has not toured internationally and wants to. She wants a physical album. She has been training at an action school and found she liked it.

"This album has exactly what I wanted to do in it," she said. "I prepared it to make stages that make me happy to perform."