There was a time when LOONA stood at the edge of the K-pop imagination — cryptic lore, monthly girl reveals, oddball teaser loops, and a visual language so distinctive that fans could spot a Digipedi edit within seconds. For years, it felt like the group was building toward something mythic. Then: silence, collapse.

ARTMS, rising from those fractured parts, have never pretended to pick up where LOONA left off. Instead, ARTMS – HeeJin, HaSeul, Kim Lip, JinSoul, Choerry – have chosen reinvention by confronting legacy, rupture, and the impossibility of closure.

“Icarus,” the title track from their new mini-album Club Icarus, doesn’t offer the kind of surface-level payoff K-pop often demands. Instead, it builds upon an ever-deepening mythos to deliver something closer to digital folklore: eerie, disjointed, ritualistic, and defiantly slow-burning. This isn’t a comeback crafted for mass appeal, but one made with long-term memory in mind.

That ethos extends across the full project, which positions ARTMS as a high-concept performance collective actively re-engineering what a K-pop comeback can be. In its full form, “Icarus” is a fifteen-minute cinematic descent, pulling from Greek mythology, techno-horror, and the group’s own tangled visual canon. Yes, it’s big-budget. Yes, it’s cinematic (the clue is literally in the title of the MV). But it resists the compressed storytelling and aesthetic predictability that define today’s so-called “high-concept” releases.

Once again, Digipedi — the experimental production team behind LOONA’s genre-warping MV run — returns not just to direct, but to co-author. Known for their cerebral editing, hyper-saturated palettes, and recursive symbolism, Digipedi don’t just direct; they design visual languages that reward obsession. The result feels less like a music video, and more like a myth being reprogrammed in real time.

“Icarus”: A Requiem for Pop Structure

From the opening note, “Icarus” announces itself not as a typical K-pop title track, but as a piece of performance art in disguise. It begins in grandeur — scaling pianos, staccato strings, and a melody that wouldn’t feel out of place in the great hall of a gothic fantasy RPG. But just as you settle in, the floor gives way. Off-kilter drums erupt like digital malfunction, cutting through the reverie. 

As with much of ARTMS’ work, “Icarus” is a creative risk, eschewing the euphoric builds and payoffs many listeners expect from K-pop for something colder, more arcane, and far more lasting. The result is dissonant, theatrical, and deeply intentional.

In their performance-art glory, ARTMS confront the listener with a structure that actively resists singalong simplicity. The “reborn like a phoenix wing” ending chant lands less as a climax than a ritual incantation — mystical, slightly unsettling, yet undeniably powerful. It’s not catchy in the traditional sense, but it haunts. The track doesn’t build up and break down; it dissolves, warps, and re-emerges in strange new forms.

As a standalone song, “Icarus” will be polarising. But as part of the greater mythos ARTMS are sculpting — particularly in its fourteen-minute, forty-second cinematic MV — it becomes clear that this isn’t designed to be a hit. It’s designed to be remembered. 

A Cinematic Universe, Not Just a Music Video

Titled “Icarus (Cinematic Ver.)”, the visual treatment clocks in at nearly fifteen minutes — but “music video” barely captures what this sensory short film is. Digipedi have once again thrown the rulebook into a volcano and danced around the fire, crafting what feels like Serial Experiments Lain meets Black Swan in a digital afterlife.

It’s hard to distill this short film — there are simply too many highlights, and it has to be seen to be believed. There are no trendy tropes, no obvious fashion flexes. Instead: techno-horror aesthetics, metaphysical lore, shifting identities, references to self-destruction and digital rebirth. The visuals recall uncanny liminal spaces, the act of “playing God” with identity. It’s eerie, mythic, and unshakably bold.

The choreography sequence deserves its own study. Set in a dingy, industrial underworld that recalls the desolate landscape of Olivia Hye’s “Egoist,” the performance transforms myth into movement. Identities blur — solo becomes duo becomes ensemble — often so fluidly that viewers don’t notice until they rewind. It’s easily some of the most impressive cinematography in the history of K-pop.

There’s a gripping moment when JinSoul collapses onto the floor, her body forming a fatal silhouette like those at a crime scene. As we watch JinSoul in stillness, the music fades out to quiet reverb – and then a “la la la” chant returns like an incantation. HeeJin (yes, HeeJin, not JinSoul), animates. She crawls across the screen like a possessed spirit, contorts, then briefly morphs into HaSeul, before flickering back into herself — but now altered, graceful, haunted. The transitions are so fluid they disorient, and that’s the point — individuality here is a fragile construct, constantly eroded and rewritten.

It’s as technically masterful as it is narratively loaded. The movement itself tells the story of Icarus reimagined: not as a tale of hubris punished, but as one of transformation through pain. In the ARTMS mythology, falling has never been a failure — it’s part of the process. Wounds give way to new skin. Where the original myth warned against ambition, this version treats collapse as a chrysalis.

And just when you think the story is locking into a familiar form, the visual grammar splinters again. The “solo” sections swap members in and out so fluidly, the illusion of continuity holds. The camera cuts from individual to group, then to another individual without warning, reinforcing a sense of porous identity. The choreography becomes a medium through which time, selfhood, and narrative collapse in on themselves — not chaos, but design.

Lore as Legacy: The Evolution from “Virtual Angel” and “Birth”

“Icarus” doesn’t arrive in isolation. It builds directly on the visual and philosophical spine laid out in their previous music videos for “Virtual Angel” and “Birth”. Fans have already begun connecting the dots: the 'missing bald girl' might be linked to the girl who kissed the TV screen in "Virtual Angel", for example.

But these aren’t easter eggs for the sake of lorefarming. They speak to deeper ideas: betrayal, reincarnation, shifting power, and the question of who controls the narrative.

The questions come quickly.

Has HeeJin — the alleged creator — lost her own creation?

Armored and unsmiling, is JinSoul enacting revenge for a divine promise gone unfulfilled?

Who is the light, and who is the void? 

If you feel lost here, that’s part of the plan. With so much lore and backstory to unpack, the breadth of “Icarus” doesn’t extend a guiding hand to new viewers. But there’s enough meat in the scenes to encourage curious minds to dive deeper.

For those paying close attention, nearly every frame reveals something new. It feels like mythology, not in the sense of adapting old stories, but in creating new ones — stories that feel ancient, divine, and still unfolding.

The Club as Afterlife: Inside Club Icarus

The philosophical underpinnings of “Icarus” echo across the Club Icarus EP — an eerie, fractured suite that mirrors the same questions of identity, betrayal, and transformation. Far from a commercial sidepiece, the project acts as an atmospheric extension of the film’s emotional terrain.

Described in promotional copy as “a safe space for those who feel lonely, isolated, or emotionally scarred,” the record is sonically splintered and spatially uncanny — a short, fifteen-minute suite pierced with digital glitches and quiet heartbreak.

Themes of obsession, divinity, self-possession, and collapse unfold across the tracks, each acting less as a linear statement and more like a memory flickering in and out of consciousness.

Across a rainbow road of synths, “Obsessed” paints love as a force that destabilises. “Goddess” channels divine wrath through murky drum & bass and Jersey club, its violence underscored by a whispered threat from HeeJin: “Goddess gonna burn it.” “Verified Beauty” rejects the need for approval entirely — not beauty as performance, but as undeniable fact. Ending on “BURN” – the infamously shelved LOONA track from 2020, resurrected and reimagined for ARTMS in 2025 – feels fittingly symbolic: the moment of rebirth.

Across the EP, genre is less a guiding principle than emotional texture. Each song feels like a different room inside Club Icarus — a place for the lonely, the betrayed, the reborn. Even the runtime feels intentional: fifteen minutes, brief but bleeding. Like a dream you only half remember, but that keeps haunting you.

Cult Over Charts

In a landscape where K-pop often moves faster than memory can hold, ARTMS are building something stubbornly durable.

While other K-pop acts in the past have flirted with high concept, few commit this deeply to world-building as resistance. ARTMS’ closest peers might not be in K-pop at all, but in avant-pop auteurs like Björk — artists who treat narrative, sound, and selfhood as unstable materials to be constantly re-coded.

With comebacks that are designed to endure, ARTMS are becoming something rare: a cult act with undeniable vision. The kind of group that reshapes the medium not by popularity, but by proof of concept. With “Icarus”, ARTMS declare war on disposability. They are building a full-on world — and only inviting those brave enough to look deeper to join them.