“Maybe I love you,” a girl wonders in a dreamy voice. She seems to know love better than anyone—more than that, she’s the very first person you’d think of if love took on human form. “Is this what love feels like?” The music video takes place somewhere in the great outdoors under the skies of rapidly changing seasons, frame following frame at a rate outside the flow of time, hinting that this girl’s love doesn’t quite belong to this world. The boy and girl who spent time all around the city as if in a dream were, it turns out, really dreaming after all, just like Stéphane and Stéphanie in Michel Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep.” The girl feels her heart flutter in the decidedly analog space of a library, only to then find herself at a flashy party, startled as she sees the artificiality given away by her skin. Is this really what love feels like? The answer isn’t spoken but appears as an onscreen chat message. Let my signal reach you. She does her best to send her true feelings through digital means. The point where kisses and hugs, XO, and binary code all intersect. X and O.
CHUU’s first studio album, “XO, My Cyberlove,” and its lead single of the same name explore loneliness inside of fantasy. Like “You, In the Fantasy” by Seo Taiji and Boys back in the day, it’s not about a single time, nor a single place. Now that the world Spike Jonze foresaw 13 years ago in his film “Her” has inched so close to reality, CHUU’s new music is really about all of us as we go on living through this strange era—one where we’re comforted more by a large language model’s responses than by a hundred conversations, and sometimes even sketch out a future for the two of us. CHUU, who sang about that elusive, ambiguous sense of loss in the ASCII art days of her previous release, the mini album “Only cry in the rain,” has now grown into a muse who sings of an age of digital disconnection.
The first words that people reach for when describing CHUU are “cute” and “lovely.” Even among idols, she has a unique way of walking right up with a bright, innocent smile and melting your heart—which is why she debuted with “Heart Attack,” a song about pledging yourself completely in the face of an attack on the heart so powerful you “don’t even realize how the time goes.” It’s also how she was able to pull off the song “love4eva” (feat. Grimes) as part of LOONA/yyxy, a subunit of a group known for their serious, mystery-filled lore—and, yes, the reason she could make the song “Hi High” work, too. What makes CHUU especially alluring is that she’s locked down a way to proactively express her personal strengths and, as proof of her growth, can lay claim to being cute and lovely at the same time.
In an interview from 2024, CHUU talked about being cute. “It feels like the thing that pushes me to want to do better,” she said. “I also think of it as a word of praise for the work I do. So I want to become more experienced. Because I still feel so inexperienced all the time.” The way she earns the trust of everyone around her by always putting them at ease with her bright smile as she calmly works tough situations, her challenging music and messages, her eagerness to tackle even the most taxing shows, the positive mindset with which she faithfully carries out the job of being an idol—all these signs of growth and endless effort come back to CHUU as medals of honor that read “cute” and “lovely.”
CHUU has been proving herself and her story through an intentional incongruity in her music where she pairs sweet characters with much more complex looks at love. The opening words to “Howl,” the song that kicked off her solo career, weren’t about endless love, but about severe despair that says, “Even if the world collapses / Whatever. I’ll be alright.” From there, the song moves to a truer kind of love: “Why don’t we save each other? All we have left are wounds.” When she came back with “Strawberry Rush” alongside a cute monster character that dragged out a part of her personality she was reluctant to reveal, she sang about racing around at the speed of light to protect someone she cares about. Her YouTube channel’s called Chuu Can Do It, and the old Korean name even translated to “CHUU Protects the World”—think about that. The singer isn’t some fragile person who needs to be saved by somebody else. She may have boundless energy and always wear a bright smile, but inside, she has the tenacity to protect others and stick by their side. That same sense of purpose expanded to include a melancholy resilience on her previous album that said it’s okay to “cry in the rain,” and with her new studio album, the shape of love as CHUU defines it once again comes into focus.
The lead single off “XO, My Cyberlove” sends a bleak message of love out into the digital age, and the whole album offers up a range of fascinating takes on love. For those who remember CHUU’s early days, when she never had any reason to feel suspicious of love that feels predestined, “Heart Tea Bag,” where she takes in the sound of rain to steep herself in someone else, deals in emotions that run much deeper than in “Only cry in the rain.” The sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet flavor of love finds its way all throughout the album. In “Canary,” CHUU promises to protect someone who’s been hurt before, and in “Loving You!,” she compares the beauty of fleeting love to a snowman who will melt away by winter’s end. Though she sings about loneliness, she never lets herself be swallowed by the gloom. The colorful spectrum of love shown in songs like “Cocktail Dress” and “Limoncello” is right in line with the kind of person who investigates love on her own terms. The end result is that “XO, My Cyberlove” is a fable for the age of AI—one that’s not purely sad, but rather that you can remember with a wry smile.
CHUU achieves this sense of balance not only in the messages she chooses to send but in the musical choices she makes as well. She experiments freely here, drawing on Afrobeats, hyperpop, R&B, ballads, and more, all grounded through her impressive vocals, proving she can handle every style with ease. At the core of her music, though, is synth pop, the genre where she shines brightest, flourishing all the flexibility, control, and lush texture of her vocals with synthesizer-driven sounds languishing within spacious instrumental arrangements. Songs like “Strawberry Rush,” “Only cry in the rain,” and “XO, My Cyberlove” are upbeat but still make you stop and think for a moment, as though CHUU’s found a balance between the explosive and direct approach of “Heart Attack” and the mystery of “Howl.” And just as you begin to lose yourself in thought, the dance moves pull you back in. The choreography of the lead single is profoundly multi-dimensional, the dancers evoking communication on a small display with each delicate shift of their arms. The movement makes us focus on the melody and the message entirely. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about the duality of love.
The choreography for “XO, My Cyberlove” ends with a wistful shot of CHUU, like a bird trapped in a cage that made me think of “The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme” by The 1975, a song that predicted the near future in a devastating way seven years ago: “’Internet, do you love me?’ / The internet looked at him and said, ‘Yes / I love you very, very, very, very, very, very much … In fact, I love you so much that I never, ever want us to be apart, ever again, ever.” But love according to CHUU is different. It’s neither excessively anxiety-inducing nor preprogrammed affection. The story of a girl who is curious about love, who wants to understand love, a girl who’s exceptionally lovely herself, dissolves into pixels and flies off the screen. The warmth of it reaches out to us lonely people here, but perhaps to someone out there in a virtual world who might be lonely too. If this is love, I want to believe in it. Even if it's only a dream.
