"Domination of the K-Pop charts"

Ever since IU's big scandal, people have been predicting her sudden and devastating downfall. I'm not sure she can hear you over the sound of her starring role in a highly-rated weekend drama and her domination of the K-Pop charts with her first post-scandal album, the A-list guest-star laden 'Modern Times'.

Modern times takes the IU we all know and love and grows her up a bit, marrying her usual lullaby-in-fantasy-land sound with the show tune and latin inspiration that LOEN's songwriters have been giving us with Ga In, Sunny Hill and FIESTAR in IU's absence. Her singing is as lovely and skillful as ever, and the songs are all the top-notch quality we expect from any IU-fronted project.

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The marketing for this project has been hilariously awesome. The title track hints at the nothing-is-what-it-seems theme of the album, the song may be called "Modern Times", but the tune is old fashioned and the lyrics tell the story of someone watching a Charlie Chaplin silent film and wondering what he's up to. This is just one of a handful of bait-and-switches IU serves up on 'Modern Times', and they only get better from here.

First, there's the duet with Ga In, "Everybody has Secrets". The teasers for this song featured a scantily-clad Ga In hanging all over a suit-wearing, stoic-faced IU. You want a topless scandal? the duo seemed to be asking. We'll give you something to talk about. The song itself isn't that far off from what we might have heard from pre-scandal IU, leaving any juicy talking points entirely to the listener's imagination. The biggest tease of them all, however, is "Between the Lips (50cm)". To be clear, I don't think anyone actually expected this song to be as suggestive as its title, but even I didn't expected her to be trolling us to the moon and back with a song asking her lover to maintain a distance of at least 50cm between their lips and hers, putting off their first kiss a little longer. Ha!

Even with all the suggestiveness and teasing, IU makes time to remind us of her status as Korea's resident fairy princess with the literally fairy-tale-inspired "The Red Shoes", which is every bit as cute and girly and wholesome as anything we would have expected from IU last year. It's not quite as amazing as "Good Day" or "You and I", but it's by far her most performance-heavy song to date, which would make it pretty hard to throw in a 3-high-note level trick.

Despite all the hype around 'Modern Times', it's very likely this is exactly the album we would have gotten from IU even if she hadn't become an overnight tabloid darling. IU and her team have, in their own somewhat snarky way, made it clear that IU is still IU and all the haters can go grumble in their comment sections while she sits on her throne at the top of the charts.

As a final note- both IU and SHINee are promoting right now. They're at all the same music shows anyway, so can we please get a special stage of Jonghyun and IU's duet "Gloomy Clock" (which was written and composed by Jonghyun, for those of you who don't know)?