If you ask MIYEON what her second solo mini album is about, she’ll say that MY, Lover explores the many faces of love. That’s technically true, but it only partially captures what she’s actually doing.
Across seven tracks, the vocalist does something more precise: she quietly pulls away from the version of herself that has been packaged and polished for nearly a decade. MY, Lover is what happens when that surface stops being enough.
And if it feels like a shift, it is. By most measures, MIYEON has already done the hard part. The 29-year-old grew up as an only child in a home where music was consistently present. Her interest in singing was early and persistent, encouraged by her father, who helped shape the environment that first made performance feel possible. Before industry definitions ever entered the picture, she studied violin, guitar, and piano at music schools, building a foundation that was deeply rooted in practice and not just ambition.
The foundation eventually became direction. While still in middle school, she auditioned for an entertainment company, and entered as a trainee. What followed were five years spent preparing for a debut that never arrived. When she left, however, she didn’t step away from music. Instead, she enrolled in a music academy to continue refining her vocals while studying composition and production with greater intent than before. After a brief trainee period at Cube Entertainment, she debuted in 2018 with (G)I-DLE (as they were known then) with the breakout single Latata. The song moved quickly. So did everything that followed.
She became one of K-pop’s most recognisable vocalists, voiced Ahri in K/DA—the globally successful virtual girl group spun out of League of Legends—and spent more than 1,000 days as the longest-running MC in the history of M Countdown, South Korea’s flagship weekly music chart show. It’s a résumé that suggests stability—someone whose career has settled into clearly defined roles: vocalist, host, performer, image. Yet MY, Lover feels less interested in maintaining those definitions.
Now in her ninth year in the industry, MIYEON repeatedly returns to the same idea: she wants to show a version of herself that feels less polished, less mediated. She describes MY, Lover as an album rooted in genuine emotion rather than a carefully engineered concept, calling the era transformative because it allowed her to focus on expressing “a more natural version of myself.”
That framing matters. MIYEON is often described in soft terms: warm, composed, effortless. MY, Lover does not abandon that image so much as complicate it. On the surface, the album is a record about love. In practice, it is a study in emotional contradiction: the way joy and disappointment can arrive from the same source, directed at the same person, sometimes within the span of a single afternoon. “Sometimes love brings happiness, but other times it can make you feel sad, frustrated, or even hurt,” MIYEON explains. “Even when those emotions are directed toward the same person, they can change in so many ways.”
That nuance—the refusal to flatten love into a single, marketable mood—gives MY, Lover much of its weight. After all, K-pop has long preferred clean emotional narratives, where love arrives neatly packaged as either euphoria or heartbreak. MIYEON’s approach feels unusually expansive. Each track approaches the same subject from a different emotional angle, and MIYEON pursued that range deliberately, shaping her vocals and delivery to match the specific texture of each feeling.
Among the album’s most significant moments is Sky Walking, her first self-composed song—a milestone that arrived, she admits, with its own pressures. Rather than allowing those expectations to dictate the process, however, she chose to release them. “I decided to let them go and approach the process more freely,” she says of her early anxieties. “I think that sense of release naturally became part of Sky Walking.”
What she describes as “release” is audible in both the lyrics and the song’s emotional architecture. MIYEON highlights a particular line: “Feel the heat burning in too deep / Light it up with your vibrant blue.” “I wanted to express the idea of easing and refreshing emotions,” she says. “I hoped the song could help soften those emotions and bring a sense of lightness.”
Ironically, the song she found most difficult was not the one she wrote herself, but the album’s title track, Say My Name. It sounds, on first listen, like the album’s most straightforward and accessible song. In truth, it posed its own particular challenge: how to capture the pain of breaking up and missing someone while keeping the song light in touch rather than heavy in feeling. “It was challenging to convey the emotions of the song while keeping the delivery light and subtle,” she says. “Because we arrived at the final version through so much experimentation, it’s a song that has stayed with me and one I remember very fondly.”
In a sense, that challenge sits at the centre of the entire project. MY, Lover is full of moments that sound effortless but are anything but, each one carefully constructed to preserve a feeling of intimacy. That philosophy extends beyond the music itself. Fashion, she argues, is not separate from any of this. It is another language with the same intention. “I believe fashion and music are inseparable,” she states. “While music delivers a message, fashion supports it—visually expanding that message by conveying its mood, concept, and even the world behind it.” For MY, Lover, that meant moving away from overt concepts and toward something more natural, allowing the visual identity of the project to reflect the same emotional openness that runs through the music.
The story of MIYEON the solo artist cannot be separated from the story of MIYEON within i-dle. She speaks about the group with the quiet certainty of someone who has built a life alongside people she trusts. Five members, survival shows, contract renewals, a rebrand—through every transition, the group’s identity has been shaped as much by shared experience as by music itself.
Her sense of closeness extends beyond the members. “Sometimes it even feels like our fans know i-dle better than we know ourselves,” MIYEON says with a laugh. “From the thoughts we’ve been having lately, to the music we’ve been enjoying, to even the smallest everyday conversations—I think all of those moments naturally come together and shape our next music.”
That intimacy is audible in Mono (featuring skaiwater), the digital single released after one of the group’s most significant periods of transition. Following their contract renewals and the decision to rebrand from (G)I-DLE to i-dle, the members found themselves reflecting on questions larger than any single release: where they were headed, what they still wanted to say, and how they envisioned their future as artists. “I think those thoughts and reflections naturally found their way into the song,” MIYEON says.
Being part of a group has also revealed aspects of herself that she might not have found alone. Chief among them: a competitive streak she didn’t know she had. “Whether it was participating in survival programmes or preparing for something together as a team, I always felt a strong sense of responsibility and a desire to do my best.” That drive, she says, only became legible to her through the friction and challenge of doing hard things with her other members.
When the demands of being a public artist become overwhelming, MIYEON reaches for something simple: gratitude. She returns, mentally, to the younger version of herself who first dreamed of becoming a singer, and measures the distance between that dream and this reality. “It reminds me of how happy and grateful I am to be loved and supported the way I am today.” That gratitude, she notes, does not soften into complacency. It comes with a sense of responsibility attached—to the people who have supported her, to the members beside her, and to the career she once only imagined. Asked what she still hopes for, her answer is strikingly modest. “To continue making music together [with i-dle] happily and healthily for a long time,” she says. “Honestly, I don’t think I could ask for anything more than that.”
If her life right now had a title track, MIYEON says it would be i-dle’s Super Lady. The powerful anthem, she says, encapsulates a sense of strength and self-belief in the face of challenge. “It’s a song that makes me feel like I can do anything!” She shares with a laugh. “Right now, I’m trying to carry that same mindset—believing in myself and moving forward with the confidence that we can do anything.”
This sense of positivity and forward-looking purpose also shapes how she imagines the future. When reflecting on what she hopes people will say when her name is mentioned years from now, her answer is disarmingly simple: “Someone who brought happiness.”
Photography Bang Kyuhyeong
Art Direction Marisa Xin
Styling Izwan Abdullah
On-set Styling Oh Juyeon
Fashion Coordination Kelly Hsu
Hair Jiwon/WOOSUN Hair & Makeup
Makeup Iseul/WOOSUN Hair & Makeup
Producer Kieran Choe
Fashion Assistant Sofia Solex