IU Returns After a Year With a Double Single That Hit #2 on Melon in 5 Hours

IU released her long-awaited double-title single on the 10th, and within five hours of its midnight drop, From This Star had climbed to number two on Melon's Top 100, sharing the top ten with chart regulars like RESCENE and BIGBANG. The companion track, Dear My Crazy Soulmate, settled at number 14 on the same chart. It's a strong opening for a singer returning after a full year away.

The two songs sit at opposite emotional poles, and that contrast is what makes the release feel considered rather than calculated. One is a farewell; the other is a lifetime promise.

A whole universe, quietly extinguished

From This Star opens with a play on the Korean word ibyeol (离別, separation), reframing it as i byeol (此星, this star): the idea that loving someone doesn't just mean accepting a person, but building an entire small world with its own climate and gravity. When that love ends, it isn't just a feeling that cools. An entire universe goes dark.

What makes IU's vocal performance here so affecting is its restraint. There's no grief performed for the back row, no bitterness. She catalogs the small specific things that only existed inside that relationship: the song playing during a first kiss, the nicknames only they used, the rituals of making up. The tone is closer to a careful inventory than a breakdown. Producers Gurum and SUMIN build a warm, refined sound around her that frames the whole thing not as defeat but as a dignified goodbye to something that was, for a time, completely real.

The song written for one person

Dear My Crazy Soulmate is addressed, by name in the album notes, to actress Yoo In-na, IU's closest friend for over a decade. The two have shared what the song frames as a lifetime's worth of private language and mutual loyalty despite a significant age gap when they first met. There's a neat coincidence (or deliberate design) in the fact that Yoo In-na's name and the name of IU's fanbase, Uaena, rhyme in Korean, and the song leans right into that.

The track's emotional core is an unconditional kind of affirmation: not cheering someone on for their competence or polish, but accepting them specifically where they're strange, breakable, and not easily explained to the outside world. The music video leans into this with characteristic warmth and wit, featuring veteran Korean actresses Na Moon-hee and Kim Young-ok in the lead roles, playing older women who break through prison walls to reach each other. It's a comic setup that lands with unexpected emotional weight: two people who will bend the rules of a cold institution just to be in the same room.

The song ends not with a fantasy of eternal youth but with a dream of growing old together as two "crazy grandmas" (gramma), still strange, still each other's. It's one of the more quietly radical images IU has written into a pop song.

What comes next

The music video for From This Star is set to drop on the 16th, with IU's sixth full-length studio album to follow shortly after. For a songwriter who has always grown by expanding the emotional territory she's willing to map in her lyrics, this single feels like a clear signal of where that album is headed: outward, toward other people, and deeper into the specific textures of how those connections actually feel.

As a critic's shorthand, IU has never let artistic ambition and mainstream appeal drift too far apart, and these two chart positions suggest she hasn't started now.