There are artists who leave a group and spend years trying to remind you who they were. Then there are artists who leave and immediately make you forget to look back.

Yves is the second kind.

Since parting ways with Blockberry Creative in 2023, the former LOONA member has released three EPs, landed a TikTok viral moment with 5.5 billion views on a single sound, collaborated with PinkPantheress and Bratty, and earned year-end recognition from NME and Billboard two years running. She has done all of this on an indie label, largely outside the K-pop promotional machine, and the music has only gotten more specific and assured with each release.

Her 4th EP NAIL drops on 17 April. Here is the full story of how she got here.

Chapter One"New" and the Standard She Set Herself

Before LOONA debuted as a full twelve-member group, each member was introduced through a pre-debut solo single. Yves got "New" in November 2017, and it landed differently from everything else in that series.

Where most of the LOONA solos leaned into sweetness or girlish charm, "New" was cool, unhurried, and slightly strange in the best way. The production sat somewhere between late-night R&B and art pop, built around a restrained groove and Yves' distinctively detached vocal delivery. She moved through it like she had nothing to prove. The song became one of the most beloved tracks in the entire LOONA catalogue, not because it was the catchiest, but because it felt like a genuine artistic statement from someone who already knew exactly what she wanted to sound like.

Chapter Twoyyxy, LOONA, and the Years Between

As part of LOONA's third sub-unit yyxy alongside Chuu, Go Won, and Hyeju, Yves helped shape one of the most aesthetically singular corners of the LOONA world. The Beauty & The Beat EP carried a sun-drenched, slightly surreal concept that suited her stage presence well, and across the full group's run she consistently drew attention for her performance quality and adaptability across concepts.

The LOONA story is, of course, a complicated one. After years of tension and a prolonged legal battle with Blockberry Creative, Yves won her contract injunction in June 2023. While some of her former members formed Loossemble and others launched ARTMS, Yves took her time. She spent months meeting with agencies, eventually signing with indie label PAIX PER MIL in March 2024. She was the last of the major LOONA soloists to find a new home.

The wait turned out to be worth it.

Chapter ThreeLOOP — A Debut That Asked New Questions

LOOP arrived on 29 May 2024, and from the opening bars of "DIORAMA" it was clear that Yves had not spent those months going through the motions. The four-track EP moved across R&B, pop-house, indie pop-rock, and acoustic folk, and it worked precisely because she never tried to make those sounds feel like a K-pop project. The label PAIX PER MIL, founded by producer MILLIC, gave her a framework built around restraint and texture rather than spectacle.

"DIORAMA" opened with buttery synths and a late-night R&B atmosphere that showed off a rawer, more intimate vocal tone than her group years had foregrounded. The title track "LOOP," featuring Korean-American rapper Lil Cherry, brought a pop-house pulse and an anti-drop structure that polarised some listeners but confirmed the sound she was building: stylish, atmospheric, and firmly outside the K-pop mainstream. "Afterglow" and "Goldfish" closed the EP with a quieter folk-rock register that felt genuinely personal.

NME ranked "LOOP" among the 25 best K-pop songs of 2024. Dazed included it in their top 50 K-pop tracks of the year. Critics and listeners who had not been following post-LOONA projects suddenly had a reason to pay attention. It was a debut that felt like an opening argument rather than a complete statement. That was exactly the right call.

Chapter FourI Did — Owning the Sound

I Did arrived in November 2024, and where LOOP had introduced a sound, I Did owned it. The five-track EP deepened the palette across "Hashtag," "Gone Girl," "Tik Tok," "Viola," and the title track, each piece occupying a slightly different sonic corner while maintaining the same atmospheric logic.

"Viola" in particular became the fan favourite, described widely as the most fully realised single of her solo career to that point. Something about its restraint and emotional directness landed differently from everything else in the EP, and it has stayed in heavy rotation for orbits ever since.

Billboard included I Did in their 25 Best K-Pop Albums of 2024 Staff Picks, making Yves one of a very small number of post-LOONA soloists to earn that kind of Western critical recognition. She also performed across Europe on the Apple Cinnamon Crunch Tour that autumn, with stops at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, the Bataclan in Paris, Huxleys in Berlin, and Orion Live Club in Rome. For UK and European fans, that run was confirmation that this was not a fandom-circuit showcase. It was a proper artist moment in proper venues.

🗓 Apple Cinnamon Crunch Tour — London Shepherd's Bush Empire · November 2024

Chapter Five"DIM" and the Moment the World Noticed

Early 2025 brought the moment that changed the scale of the conversation entirely.

"DIM," a track from the I Did: Bloom deluxe edition, went viral on TikTok in a way that few K-pop songs manage outside the genre's biggest names. The official sound accumulated 5.5 billion views on the platform, reaching number one on the US TikTok Viral 50 chart and number one on the Global K-Pop Shazam chart simultaneously. Among the creators who used the sound: Benny Blanco, Jojo Siwa, ABBA, the Champions League, and WWE.

The song itself is a deceptively simple piece of modern R&B that switches unexpectedly into drum and bass midway through, and the combination of that structural shift and its deeply atmospheric production is what made it stick far beyond the K-pop sphere. In April 2025, Yves released DIM ∞, a five-version remix EP as a direct response to the viral moment.

Chapter SixSoft Error — Going Global

Soft Error dropped in August 2025 as her third EP, and the feature announcement alone sent the internet into a spin. "Soap," a collaboration with UK pop artist PinkPantheress, samples Rebecca Black's "Sugar Water Cyanide" and arrives with a gleaming hyperpop energy that felt tailor-made for both artists. "Aibo" brought rising Mexican bedroom-pop artist Bratty in for a Spanish-language verse that expanded the project's international reach further still.

NME reviewed Soft Error warmly, describing the Yves and PinkPantheress pairing as seamless and calling "Aibo" an unearthed gem from a 2000s teen movie soundtrack. The record confirmed what had been building across her previous two EPs: Yves is operating in the same sonic territory as the most interesting alternative pop coming out of the UK and global indie scenes, and doing it with a distinctly Korean sensibility underneath.

A deluxe version, Soft Error: X, followed in October 2025 with new track "Ex Machina." She then performed the Cosmic Crispy Tour across Asia and Australia, with a homecoming show in Seoul closing out the year. Underscores tapped her for a "Do It" remix in January 2026. The collaborations keep coming, and they keep making sense.

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What's NextNAIL — Her Most Considered Work Yet

Which brings us here.

Yves' 4th EP NAIL releases on 17 April 2026. The concept is one of the most deliberate she has worked with: the album uses the physical object of a nail as a symbol for sensation itself, recording the moments where feeling connects people across nationality, language, gender, and taste. Not the inner self, but the body's state. Not definition, but the instant of recognition that needs no explanation.

The three rounds of concept photos have already established a visual world that feels more visceral and physically grounded than the dreamy atmospherics of Soft Error. Strong eye contact, a hand tattoo that visually interprets the EP's sensory keyword, red-tone lighting, smudged makeup in a dark setting. Each set has arrived with a different register, each one more assured than the last.

The collaborators are worth paying attention to. Lolo Zouaï sits at the intersection of bilingual R&B and hyperpop, and has spent the last few years building a reputation for emotionally direct, sonically adventurous pop that crosses language lines naturally. Lexie Liu brings a similarly experimental sensibility from the Chinese alt-pop scene, with a vocal presence and artistic identity that should sit well alongside Yves' cooler register. Both feel like genuine choices rather than strategic ones, which is exactly the kind of instinct that has made every Yves collaboration to date feel earned.

Yves has writing credits on four of the five tracks. After LOOP, where production credits were handled entirely by her labelmates, watching her become steadily more involved in the writing process across each subsequent release has been one of the quieter, more interesting parts of this era. NAIL reflects that.

Following the EP's release, Yves heads straight into a nine-city European tour: Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne, Munich, Warsaw, Barcelona, and Madrid. A fourteen-stop Americas tour follows in May. The scale of that itinerary says everything about where this solo project is sitting right now.

🗺 NAIL World Tour · Europe April–May · Americas May–June 2026

From the cool debut of "New" in 2017 to a TikTok sound with 5.5 billion views and a PinkPantheress feature, the arc of Yves as an artist is one of the most quietly compelling stories in contemporary K-pop. NAIL is the next chapter, and every signal points to it being her most intentional yet.

Pre-Order at SOOJIBPhysical Editions — NAIL

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