Album review – Chuu “XO, My Cyberlove”

It’s time for Kpopalypse album review! This time we’re looking at Chuu’s “XO, My Cyberlove”!

All of the album reviews on kpopalypse.com so far have been of albums from the previous two decades, so it’s time to start throwing some newer albums into the mix. Since it’s Pride Month, obviously that means we need a Chuu album review, so this seems like a perfect opportunity to review something newer! Does Chuu’s first full length solo album hold up to the k-pop classics? Let’s find out!

Chuu – XO, My Cyberlove

“XO, My Cyberlove” was ex-Loona singer Chuu’s first full-length album, but not her first release as a solo artist post-Loona. The album comes in multiple digital formats, as well as two different CD variants and even vinyl, but the tracklisting is the same on every version. The album reached a peak of #8 on Korea’s weekly album charts. Chuu did not write any of the music or lyrics, with tracks instead being penned by a mixed bag of various Korean and western songwriters.

1. XO, My Cyberlove

The album kicks off with the title track and feature, which is a straightforward pop song that’s very much cut from the same cloth as Fifty Fifty’s “Cupid“. Simple rhythm and harmony, relatively busy bass guitar and careful attention to melodic phrasing are the strengths of both songs, but I’d say that “XO, My Cyberlove” is superior just due to playing into those strengths a little more. There’s less detail in the backings and more space between the vocal lines in Chuu’s song, those are definitely positives because the melody is the song’s strength so more room for it to shine is appropriate. Bonus points for touching lyrics and some not-very-convincing-but-still-cute heterosexual cosplay in the music video.

2. Canary

The other feature track of the album “Canary” doesn’t quite hit the same heights as the title track, despite having reasonable melodic writing. The big lighter-waving chorus isn’t bad in isolation, but doesn’t really fit with the softer double-time verse. Either the heavy anthemic slow chorus feel or the softer rhythmically tense verse feel would have worked over the entire song if they were on their own, the songwriter just needed to pick one of them and stick with it. Together the parts just don’t fit and it makes the chorus feel like a letdown instead of the dynamic explosion that it could have been, but it’s still powerful enough in that big chorus to make an impression, even if this song isn’t all that it could have been.

3. Cocktail Dress

One of the pacier songs on the album, “Cocktail Dress” isn’t as melodically catchy as the better Chuu songs and also lacks rhythmic punch a little. It’s definitely a song that could have benefitted from leaning towards a slightly heavier rock feel, the fairly mellow and cruisy instrumental is nice but doesn’t quite suit it as much as an Olivia Rodrigoficiation would have. The results are still good but a faster take on the feel of the title track isn’t necessarily a better one if the instrumental treatments don’t match. Still a decent track and one of the album’s better songs anyway, but it just should have slapped harder than this.

4. Limoncello

The first song that really doesn’t work that well at all, “Limoncello” is driven by some weird marimba-whatsit pattern that never changes and gets annoying fast. The song only goes for just over two minutes but since you’ll be sick of the tinkly-loop after about twenty seconds, the song still manges to overstay its welcome by a significant amount. The meandering melody also isn’t very catchy and the rhythms are some lame thing that I thought k-pop groups stopped learning to do around the time miss A’s “Breathe” flopped. Not the most horrible track like this that ever existed in k-pop, but a definite miss.

5. Teeny Tiny Heart

“Teeny Tiny Heart” is pretty cool, with its old-school hip-hop beat moving the thing along at a decent pace and some cute melodies. The chorus takes on a bit of a ska feel in the rhythms and I wished they’d leaned into it a little more than they did, that’s something that would have given the entire song a real shot in the arm, a very ska’ed out version of the song would be awesome. As it is it’s still nice and definitely has the catchiest chorus on the whole album outside the title track. Although not the best song here it’s the one that seems to suit Chuu’s image the most, the overall vibes making it feel like a hip-hop/ska reimagining of her Loona debut “Heart Attack“, so definitely welcome.

6. Love Potion

A truly bland take on the latin/afrobeat sound, there’s not much going on here of interest. Chuu gets lumbered with a pretty grinding and annoying chorus melody to sing, and there’s not much else going on here either with the beat being all lame rimtaps that never kick into gear and the harmony just boringly cycling over the same two chords. It’s all a bit of a waste of time, but fortunately not a lot of time as it’s mercifully short.

7. Heart Tea Bag

Sonically interesting but musically boring, “Heart Tea Bag” (sorry, what?) has some very cool sounds going on in the backing track but doesn’t do a thing worthwhile with them. Another song where the harmony isn’t much more than two chords that cycle over and over while Chuu does annoying warbles over the top, this is essentially just the previous song “Love Potion” but in semi-ballad form and even more boring. Amazingly, the two songs are by two separate groups of songwriters so I wonder if they compared notes or if this type of dullness just comes naturally to pop songwriting in 2026. This isn’t the full-ballad disaster it could have been but it’s not much good either.

8. Hide & Seek

Another song like “Teeny Tiny Heart” that leans on hip-hop styled beats, but this song doesn’t have beats as good and also doesn’t do as much with them. The track starts promisingly enough but zero actually happens after that (thanks to boring harmony again) and there’s nothing particularly catchy here to make you remember this instead of the album’s better tracks. Absolute filler, the song is only notable for being a Chuu song that doesn’t feature the words “Heart” or “Love” anywhere in the song title.

9. Loving You!

One hell of a strange song to end the album on, “Loving You” doesn’t really sound like anything else here, or anything else that Chuu has done before in general. Weird Red-Velvety sonics and odd rhythms punctuate the verses but the chorus is relatively straightforward and kicks a lot of the built-up feel straight to the curb. It’s a weird combination which has basically the same issues as “Canary”, but unlike that song, this doesn’t have much catchy melody, and the two parts don’t sound all that good in isolation either. Despite the exclamation mark in the title (I have a theory that Chuu stole all of Wooah’s punctuation) there’s not much excitement in the actual song. If nothing else it’ll make you want to play the first song again and forget this exists, so at least it has that function.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While the prospect of a full Chuu album was appealing, the Chuu energy here is a little too thin on the ground to make this album work as a whole. Only the title track and “Teeny Tiny Heart” suit her, everything else is something that either sounds like it needed some fixing before release, or something that should have been forgotten about or left on some lame western R&B singer’s album instead so I didn’t have to listen to it. Having said that nothing here is truly awful either, even the worst songs are at least semi-tolerable, but I feel like whoever put this album together doesn’t really understand Chuu’s appeal. Clearly we are in a Chuu energy crisis – there definitely isn’t enough supply of what makes Chuu’s better songs great here to meet demand. Chuu has been mostly getting it right lately with feature tracks, and the title title track here is a fine example of that, so it’s clear that there’s a template that’s been identified that works, it just needs to be deployed a bit more consistently for Chuu to have the classic album that she deserves.

That’s all for this post! If you want certain albums reviewed let me know and I’ll add them to the ever-growing list! Kpopalypse will return!