Luli Lee’s Brave New World is an EP shaped as much by time and perspective as by sound, and Lee’s track-by-track notes – exclusively shared with KPOPWORLD – reveal a creative process grounded in curiosity and long-held ideas finally finding their moment.

Demos and unfinished sketches sat dormant, and ideas were set aside until they aligned with Lee’s present mindset. What ties Brave New World together isn’t a fixed narrative, but a shared willingness to revisit the past without nostalgia – to ask whether an idea still resonates, and whether it can now be expressed more honestly.

That sense of play runs through the record’s four songs, even at its most confrontational. “You’ll Be My Mad Dog,” for all its aggressive posture, emerges from a deliberately light impulse. Lee describes wanting the track to feel fun, building its identity around exhaust-like sounds and driven bass tones. Those listening closely will hear siren noises in the background; this wasn’t planned, and was captured accidentally during a demo session but kept because it felt right. The result is a song that sounds forceful but was made without solemnity.

Perspective shifts again on “King of the New World,” where Lee experiments not just with sound, but with delivery. Singing in a space between narration and rap, she treats the voice as rhythm rather than melody, reinforcing the idea that change doesn’t always require grand gestures – sometimes it starts with a slight adjustment in how something is said.

“OCD” brings the EP into more grounded territory. Originally written years earlier, the track finds new relevance as Lee’s personal relationship to its subject matter evolves. Here, physical sensation takes precedence over explanation, with bass and drums moving in close alignment. The focus isn’t on storytelling, but on how repetition, tension, and release are embodied through sound.

The EP closes with “Unknown Artist,” a song that collapses the distance between past and present. Unlike the heightened characters of the earlier tracks, this one reflects Lee’s real life; a return to reality rather than an open-ended question. Completed with a sound familiar to longtime listeners, it acts as a grounding point, suggesting continuity rather than conclusion.

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You'll Be My Mad Dog

The first track released from the album was “You’ll Be My Mad Dog.”

Both the lyrics and the title came from a simple place—I just wanted it to be fun, playful, almost like a joke.

From the very first sketch, I had a clear goal: to create a piece built around sounds reminiscent of car exhaust. That’s why the track opens with an exhaust-like sound, establishing its identity right away, and why I shaped the bass with a driven tone. Even in the sections made up only of instrumentation—though it may be hard to notice—the exhaust sound is still present.

The faint siren you can hear comes from a real moment while I was monitoring the demo. A passing ambulance’s siren bled into the recording, and it felt surprisingly well suited to the song. That’s why I decided to incorporate a siren sound into the final arrangement.

King of the New World

I wanted to explore the idea that a whole new world can open up surprisingly easily, through a single shift in perspective. Also, the underlying theme of this song was a message to people who have hurt me.

Because I didn’t want the album to feel overly serious, I approached this track in a playful way as well. For the chorus, I tried something completely new for me—singing in a space somewhere between narration and rap. I wanted it to come across less as a conventional melody and more like rhythmical words.

OCD

This track also opens with a driven bass line and tells a story about my struggles with OCD. I originally created it as a demo after watching a zombie film in my early to mid-twenties, and I’d been holding onto it ever since before finally including it on this album.

After shifting my perspective and discovering a new world, my OCD began to ease, which is why I felt this track finally earned its place on the record. As I play bass, I found the interplay with the drums especially engaging—I enjoy aligning the details of my playing closely with the drum line. If you listen with that interaction in mind, I think the track reveals itself in a much richer way.

Unknown Artist

This was another song I had sketched out in my twenties but left unfinished for a long time. By chance, I listened to the song again after years of forgetting about it, and it felt no different from where I am in my life now.

If the previous three tracks lean toward fantasy, I see this one as rooted in reality. I wanted to express a sense of freedom and release for the songs that “died” after meeting me as an unknown artist, and I tried to capture that feeling through the sound of the tom drums.

Because the earlier tracks explore sounds that differ slightly from my previous work, I wanted this song in particular—one that reflects reality—to feel familiar to my longtime listeners.