Album Review – IU “Modern Times”

Since you all seem to love album reviews, here’s Kpopalypse’s review of IU’s “Modern Times”!

Ever since I announced that I was going to start reviewing albums, which was only two weeks ago, I have been absolutely flooded with album review requests for literally every k-pop artist you can imagine. So since I absolutely love popularity and being loved and admired and hate offending or upsetting people, let’s do more of them, yay!

As I have a massive list of albums to review, I’m going to start off by dusting off some of the older albums that I actually generally enjoy, kind of, at least a little. So those wanting reviews of something that just came out recently are going to have to wait a while as I clear some important backlog. Let’s go with another album that I’ve held up previously as a rare success in the world of k-pop albums.

IU – MODERN TIMES

“Modern Times” is the third album from solo Korean idol singer IU, and it stands apart from almost every other k-pop idol album in existence, in that it’s a very clearly defined “concept album”. The songs on it are not narratively connected like in many western concept albums, but they are (mostly) thematically and musically connected. The theme of the album here is “modernism“, in the “cultural/artistic movement” sense of the word, which in this case means 1930s/1940s “art deco” and “noir” style visuals and the music genres of the era to match – big band, swing, jazz, bossanova and so on.

1. Love of B (feat. Park Juwon)

As with many k-pop albums, the best music on “Modern Times” is all within the first few minutes, and “Love Of B” is IU’s crazily high quality take on 1930s style swing-jazz complete with authentic Django Rinehardt style acoustic guitar shredding. This song has been performed live, but the live versions are never as good as the one on the record, because they always edit out or botch the guitar solo to some extent, mind you that’s completely understandable as it’s very difficult and extremely hard to get right. However even without that element it’s still fire, IU’s vocal melody being completely free from bullshit, matching the style and tone of the genre perfectly. It’s definitely as fitting a tribute to the swing jazz era as any other and with its fast rhythms it’s a welcome perky change from the limp, boring Fender Rhodes-driven coffee-shop style jazz that permeates so much of the rest of k-pop, not to mention one of the best retro pop songs in general. It’s a fantastic song, one of the best of the 2010s, and it’s all downhill from here, folks.

2. Everybody Has Secrets (feat. Gain of Brown Eyed Girls)

I’m not knowledgable enough about old fart music to know if this is salsa, samba, or something else, I was probably catching a quick nap when the lecturer was talking about this stuff back when I was studying for my music degree. However this version of whatever this bullshit style is, happens to actually be pretty good, thanks to once again being fairly uptempo while still smooth enough to keep within the album concept. IU and Gain are more or less interchanageable vocally here, and I can barely tell who is singing when, nor do I really give a fuck to be honest, it still sounds pretty good. Once again the melodies match the music and that wasn’t a big or unusual deal in 2013 when this came out but boy it sure fucking is in 2025 where topline writers just write any old fucking crap and disregard the backing track’s harmony completely, so that’s great and it all adds up to a quality album track that doesn’t suck.

3. Between The Lips (50cm)

A slow acoustic swing ballad, “Between The Lips (50cm)” had a teaser video but not a full release because whoever was making the decisions over at LOEN/1theK was a horrible person and hopefully they’re dead under a bridge with a needle in their arm by now because that’s what they deserve for robbing us of a full video for this song. It’s one of the better IU songs in general, leaning hard into the swing feel and proving that ballads can actually be interesting if you have decent melodic and rhythmic scheme. A slightly weak ending is really the only thing wrong with it, everything kind of just quickly dies in the ass in the last twenty seconds after a really good buildup but it’s still very cool on average and k-pop ballad songwriters could improve their game a lot by writing more like this and less like what they usually do.

4. The Red Shoes

“The Red Shoes” is the big feature track, which hit the Kpopalypse favourites list in its year of release, and so it should as it’s a quality song, written by Lee Minsu, the person responsible for a lot of IU’s other big epic features such as “Good Day“, “Last Fantasy“, and “Above The Time“. “The Red Shoes” retains the epic, heavily orchestrated feel of those other songs that he’s known for, while adding some 1940s style big-band cabaret instrumentation and melodic motifs to fit the album’s theme, plus a cracking pace largely unique to itself. The chorus in particular is a thing of beauty and you’ll be singing that “summertime” hook to yourself all day after hearing this. The whole song works really well because hearing this type of sound with crisp modern production quality and an excellent melodic sensibility is really rare, in fact I can’t think of a single other song that uses these type of textural elements that I actually like at all. Note that I’ve used the “performance version” of this video because it accurately reflects what’s on the album, but there’s a longer version of the video around with a ton of extra esoteric drama bullshit if you happen to be into that.

5. Modern Times

For the title track, IU’s producers went with a ragtime-flavoured swing sound, now that’s something that I pretty much don’t hear in k-pop ever. I have significant PTSD that gets triggered whenever I hear ragtime because I spent my pre-teens grinding through oppressively hard piano ragtime pieces like the “Maple-Leaf Rag“, “The Entertainer“, “Black And White Rag” etc while other kids were having coloured-block playtime. Fortunately “Modern Times” palms off most of the ragtime licks to the clarinet (or whatever that toot-toot instrument is) so I’m able to listen to it comfortably because it doesn’t have quite enough piano to trigger the shakes and clammy hands and helicopter noises and screaming. It’s decent. Video version here so I can look at the pretty people being pretty and try to forget staring at my hands on black and white keys for hours each day after school.

6. Bad Day

We’re all familiar with iconic IU feature track and Starcraft esports fan favourite “Good Day” but did you know that IU also had a song called “Bad Day”? Did you also know that it’s mostly fucking boring? The good run couldn’t last forever and here we have the album’s first skippable track. It admittedly does get a little bit interesting in the last third with some pretty hefty drums and bass guitar action plus some neat vocal harmonies, but the grind to get there is dull and it’s too little too late. Also the song just doesn’t fit the theme of the rest of the album much at all, sounding more or less like any other modern pop ballad ever. It’s probably not surprising that IU wrote the music to this song herself, because it just doesn’t measure up to the commissioned tracks, I guess she just doesn’t have the musical knowledge to tackle the concept properly as a songwriter. (To be fair that’s a tough ask – try asking any new songwriter “write like early 20th centure modern jazz style but also make it pop” and they will struggle with good reason.) Oh well, at least she probably got paid off it, the council rates on all that real estate she owns won’t pay themselves.

7. Obliviate

IU’s first ever stab at the bossanova genre that I’m aware of is actually really very good and to my knowledge the best bossanova track in k-pop’s existence. What makes it work is that all the instruments lean into the bossanova feel very heavily, and they lay into the rythms hard, it’s not subtle and practically apologising for its own existence like most k-pop bossanova tracks, nor is it mixing the bossanova with other dogshit stylistic elements like trap beats in some kind of musical genre shit-fight. All of this keeps it dynamic and at least somewhat out of elevator music land… although not completely, it is bossanova after all.

8. Walk With Me, Girl (feat. Choi Baek Ho)

I don’t know much about Choi Baek Ho because I’m ignorant I guess but whatever, this ballad kind of suits his style. It’s bossanova once again but slowed right the fuck down this time, and it still works, with IU and Baek Ho trading vocals quite pleasantly without rubbing the wrong way against the music. It’s not going to set the world on fire but it fits the bill for the album concept. I’ve used the “You Hee Yeol’s Sketchbook” live version for this post because they modified the audio so heavily on that show that you’re really pretty much just listening to the album version anyway (a precursor to Killing Voice etc I guess), and don’t they look good together, yes they do.

9. Havana

At this point I think the songwriters were running out of ideas because this song is just bossafuckingnova again, and not as good as the other bossanova tracks that come just before it. After a deceptively maudlin string intro, the mood of this one ends up being much sunnier, and the song once it kicks in properly isn’t a failure, just a little bit middling. At least it has fast tempo going for it, coming off a bit like Twice’s “Alcohol Free” at twice the speed and without the electronic drums, which is not a horrible place to be musically, just a bit underwhelming.

10. A Gloomy Clock (feat. Jonghyun of SHINee)

An entirely skippable duet which probably has value for SHINee fans who miss Jonghyun (although half of those same fans complained bitterly about IU and Jonghyun being in the same room together back when this came out, go look it up) but this song isn’t wildly different to everyone else’s k-pop ballads musically. The song was also written by Jonghyun, but sadly this only shows that he (like her) wasn’t an advanced enough songwriter to really lean into the album concept properly, as there’s little here that actually fits with the album’s musical theme. At least at under three minutes the song doesn’t overstay its welcome too much, but it’s three minutes of your life that you could be using to listen to “Love of B” again.

11. Daydream (feat. Yang Hee Eun)

Another boring duet, this time with 1970s folk singer Yang Hee Eun, which has some nice string sounds and singing but just isn’t much of a song. It’s also another song which barely has anything to do with the album theme, not really harking back to any of the early 20th century styles like the better tracks on the album do. Absolutely a song that would be been better just left off the album completely, it feels to me like it’s here just because it was in the vault and no other reason.

12. Wait

Another song that got its own teaser, but no full release, except this time we should probably be grateful because it’s frankly a bit of a fucking mess. IU once again wrote this one herself, presumably by sitting with a producer at a DAW with a mouse in one hand and a bottle of the soju she was busy promoting at the time in the other, because that’s how this sounds. A weird hybrid of old school style plus sample cut-and-paste silliness complete with weird lumpy audio fuck-ups (did she accidentally headbutt the microphone at 0:08?), it’s both literally and figuratively the sound of the album falling apart just before the finish line.

13. Voice Mail

Listed as a “bonus track”, whatever that even means, presumably in the hope that we’ll forgive it for basically being crap, “Voice Mail” like most of the album’s shittest tracks was written by IU herself. A good songwriter she is clearly not, and that’s not to say it’s the worst written song ever or anything but if IU’s career relied purely on her own songwriting ability she wouldn’t be where she is today, that’s for sure.

MODERN TIMES EPILOGUE – REPACKAGE TRACKS

As usual for any Korean pop album from the 2010s that gained any degree of traction, “Modern Times” had a scammy “repackage” version that came with new (inferior) artwork and extra tracks, coercing superfans into buying the entire album again at full album price just for those tracks plus the new booklet. Interestingly, it didn’t work, and sales of the repackaged album were actually quite low compared to the initial buzz around “Modern Times” in its original form, probably because the asking price of the repackage was apparently through the fucking roof due to the extra DVDs full of concert and behind the scenes footage that came with it. The new songs were tacked onto the start of the album because the label were too dumb to figure out how to integrate them seamlessly into the album’s flow, and they were:

1. Friday (feat. Jang Yi-Jeong of HISTORY)

IU’s label were pretty keen on pushing their new boy group History back in 2013, and so a duet with one of the boys and IU probably seemed like a logical choice. Unfortunately, “Friday” was yet another one of IU’s crappy self-penned ballads, and I don’t think this particular song helped either of them all that much. It certainly had no business being the very first track on the repackage given that there’s no trace of the album’s musical themes here. It’s a shame it didn’t work out because History were one of the best boy groups of the 2010s, they and IU on a track together could have been a killer combination if done right, but clearly nobody had any clue how to make this work. Sadly, History disbanded a few years later after releasing a few great songs but with very little else to show for it.

2. Pastel Crayon

A bland OST song for a romantic k-drama called Bel Ami, “Pastel Crayon”, aka “Crayon Pastels” aka “Crayon” flirts with old-school style just a little but sounds far too much like an inoffensive television theme tune to have any impact. There’s no spark to speak of, it might as well be the Brady Bunch theme, in fact I’d say the Brady Bunch theme is a more memorable tune than this. Given that it was already available in its original OST form anyway, the song’s inclusion here is a bit of a mystery, it had no business being on the repackage at all.

FINAL THOUGHTS

K-pop doesn’t really have any great concept albums, but it does have IU’s “Modern Times”, which is about two-thirds of a great concept album. The other third is unfortuantely pretty lacking, but there’s a lot of good songs here to listen to before the album starts really hitting the skids. At its best it’s a bold move into an untrendy concept that mostly works, at its worst its a self-indulgent vehicle for IU’s under-developed pet songwriting projects, but as a whole it’s a net positive which I can’t actually say with my hand on my heart about many k-pop albums at all. Just don’t worry about the repackage, unless you just want it for the extra fancy box and bonus content rather than the songs.

That’s it for this post! Kpopalypse will return!