K-Pop Queen CL on Her Indie Comeback: 'My Album Is Like Me Writing a Book'

[Ruthless Love 7,324]

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The colors CL wore were as loud as her message. Sporting knee-high boots and a Froot Loop-hued puffy jacket, she led a squad of dancers through Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art with the authority of a drill sergeant. In a remote performance that felt more like a music video than a livestream when it aired in October, the former member of pioneering South Korean girl group 2NE1 was making her return to the spotlight on The Late Late Show With James Corden, where in 2016 she became the first K-pop artist to appear on its stage. “I’m baaaack!” she sneered into her mic before launching into her comeback single, a gritty hip-hop banger called “+HWA+.” “Don’t let your eyes wander away,” she later rapped in Korean before switching back to English: “You can’t kill me.”

Those words of survival were more than bluster. In the early 2010s, it seemed practically preordained that CL would be the first K-pop artist to become a true global superstar. As the multilingual breakout member of 2NE1 (she grew up in South Korea, Japan and France), her promise rested in part in her ability to bridge cultures; she was as at ease appearing on Korea’s lighthearted variety shows as she was collaborating with the likes of Skrillex and Diplo. Yet, on the brink of her solo breakthrough, her musical output slowed as her Korean and American teams seemed to fall out of sync, sparking a fan-led online campaign seeking #JusticeForCL.

Now, she’ll finally release her debut studio album, +ALPHA+, in the first half of 2021. Once the pacesetter for K-pop’s Western migration, CL, whose new music freely mixes Korean and English, is returning to a U.S. music scene that has changed immensely. Cultural and language barriers are no longer the obstacles they once were, and the idea of “crossing over” is practically outdated. Today, K-pop artists like Blackpink and BTS are as embedded in the American mainstream as Samsung, and Latin artists like Bad Bunny and J Balvin need no translation to gain traction in the United States. The biggest global acts win fans and top the charts without compromising their visions.

CL, 29, is backed by management from Scooter Braun’s SB Projects and distributed by Kakao M, a conglomerate that owns four of Korea’s biggest music labels as well as the country’s top messaging app (KakaoTalk) and most popular music streaming service (MelOn). Yet for the first time in her career, she is an independent artist and will release +ALPHA+ through her own company, Very Cherry, which is also the name of the Haus of Gaga-esque creative team that helped assemble her Corden spectacle. Without the practically bottomless resources K-pop labels are known for, CL knows the indie path will look different from other chapters of her career. “I know exactly where I’m going, what I want to do,” she says on a late-December Zoom call from her apartment in Seoul, where her gold jewelry gleams in the midday sun. “Of course it’s not going to be the same. But this is where I want to start.”

That scrappy spirit pervades her new music. +ALPHA+ embraces her status as an outlier of the international pop scene, with hooky pop-R&B hybrids, avant-garde electronic touches and distorted, speaker-busting hip-hop that stand apart from the glossy acts for which she helped paved the way. “2020 was the beginning of my rebirth and rewriting my own story,” says CL. “I can freely share different sides of me.”

That freedom is, given the state of the world, figurative for the moment. “Of course it starts at the craziest time,” she says, laughing. She jokes that she is on day “I don’t even know” of self-quarantine in Seoul, preparing for a solitary Christmas away from her family. She wistfully sighs as she mentions her grandma’s homemade kimchi, but she is learning to treasure the solitude, too. “I never get time alone,” she says. She is upbeat yet guarded, turning the conversation away from trickier topics with the kind of media training K-pop stars are famous for. At no point in our 80-minute conversation does she remove her mirrored sunglasses.

In late 2019, CL made her independent debut with the In the Name of Love EP, a confident hopscotch through synth-pop, EDM and R&B. It didn’t include the big-name collaborations she recorded a few years prior; she is vague about what happened to those songs and talks about them as if they are lost to the great external hard drive in the sky. “Hopefully the people I did work with, we could reconnect and make something better,” she says calmly. “If it’s out of my control, I can’t do anything about it. What I can do is make a better song. That’s under my control.”

She then cues up a couple of unreleased songs from +ALPHA+ on her phone. The first is classic CL, with a punishing beat, expletive-laden rap verses and a bratty playground-chant hook. It’s the next song that she seems anxious about. She lets out a little nervous laugh as she hits play on a hypnotic, left-field track with airy vocals and skittering synths. “It’s a little different from the CL sound,” she says apprehensively. But it’s a stunner, touching on the breezy vibes of contemporary pop and R&B with an artiness that I suggest edges her music closer to the work of, say, FKA twigs. “Yes!” she says, delighted at the comparison.

Already, “+HWA+” has hit No. 3 on Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart and has inspired a makeover trend on TikTok whose videos have garnered over 7 million views. But the adventurous material CL plays me is an indication that, even if she doesn’t storm the charts, she could at the very least find a home on the fringes of mainstream pop alongside cult-favorite rule-breakers like Charli XCX and Lorde (both vocal fans of CL). “We could do a lot of different things without having to worry about catering to a certain genre,” says +ALPHA+ producer Dave Hamelin, whom CL met a few years ago but hit up in 2020 after hearing his work with alt-R&B star 070 Shake. “That’s what attracted me to working with her: It’s pretty limitless.”

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[Chris 59,315]

 

[Diego 9,677]

I hope CL drags the shit out of YG with this album

 

I'm so glad she is free and she can do whatever she wants

 

tbh I can't wait for her new album 

[SHANE 1,436]

i am too excited for this album  a debut with her own ideas is long overdue. HWA is one of the best songs of 2020