Album Review: The Winning by IU

 

In interviews and videos leading up to the release, IU described herself as a “spore” as opposed to a flower and explained that she found the idea of living as a spore much more appealing. I’ll be frank, I cannot for the life of me figure out what this is supposed to mean. I’m sure there’s some cool metaphor in there about self-worth or success or being yourself, but I’m just not getting it. If she’s happy as a spore, that’s more power to her I guess.

 

The EP is cohesive enough to feel like more than a collection of random tracks, but it doesn’t push itself too hard to be the next great thing. The tracklisting is wisely constructed, such as placing the piano-driven intro of the ballad “Love wins all” after the eccentric funk of “Shh..”, and none of the tracks feel overly redundant like has happened with some of her previous releases.

 

The opening track “Shopper” is gloriously massive and exuberant. It feels like a natural progression into this space for a singer who is most well-known for their smaller, more personal tracks. This sort of scaling often becomes something more like the aforementioned “Love wins all” - a quiet ballad piece that explodes into a full orchestra of emotion and passion complete with choirs and a key change by the end. Both styles are good, and IU slyly reminds the listener that she’s good enough to pull either end of the spectrum off.

 

 

I really love the ambition on “Shh..”. The song blends multiple generations of K-pop stardom together and really stretches for unique territory compared to most Korean pop nowadays. However, in execution the track struggles a bit to maintain a cohesive identity. While I applaud the idea of having so many different voices and perspectives on one track,  the singers selected just don’t mesh as well as I would have hoped. It’s incredible in K-pop how groups of five, ten, even fifteen people are able to work their voices together in a way that highlights the strengths of each, and I think it’s easy to become desensitized to multiple singing styles on the same track. However, when I took a step back to really listen to “Shh..”, the contrasting timbre of the singers made for some unfortunately abrupt transitions in my opinion.

 

 

The last track I have to highlight is the closer. If you’ve seen videos from the likes of RJ Pasin online, “I stan U”  has a lot of that sort of busy midwest emo-esque guitar work in the background. It’s subtle enough to prevent the track from slipping into J-pop territory, but it helps add some fun texture to an otherwise typical power pop track. Also, ‘typical’ should not be understood as a dig, as the song is genuinely quite fun and serves as a nice closer for the brisk five-track EP.

 

 

 

The Winning lives up to its title as there aren’t really any misses here. The best tracks in my opinion are “Love wins all” and “I stan U”, but “Shopper” is a very close third place. Overall, The Winning isn’t IU’s greatest work yet by any means, but it is a solid collection of ideas and tracks from a skilled singer-songwriter. If nothing else, this EP serves as a reminder why IU is so highly revered and offers an inspiring hope that there’s plenty of IU to come.