Discussion: SOUL LADY by YUKIKA

Before Yukika Teramoto mononymously became known as the k-pop idol YUKIKA, she was first a model and seiyuu in Japan. She was born on February 16, 1993, in Shizuoka, the second-largest city in the prefecture of the same name. Yukika grew up some 3 hours away in the mega city of Tokyo. As a pre-teen, Yukika modeled for magazines and took up voice-acting gigs for video games and anime. But in 2016, she passed an audition to be part of a k-pop group called Real Girl Project. That was the year she left everything behind to become an idol in Seoul.

When asked in an interview how different it was living in Korea, Yukika said that Seoul didn’t feel foreign at all. “I have found that Seoul is chic and energetic like Tokyo and has the warm atmosphere that I felt in Shizuoka,” she says. As if she had been living there all her life. 

Yukika debuted as a solo artist under the record label called ESTIMATE Entertainment in February 2019, with the release of her digital single entitled NEON. Unlike the R&B, hip hop, and imposing electronic sounds de rigueur to k-pop, NEON is soft and nostalgic. Her brand of music was City Pop, the funky and carefree sound of an optimistic Japan, spurred by the economic boom that accompanied the growth of Tokyo in the 1980s.

Her 12-track album called SOUL LADY came out later, some 18 longer-than-long months later, in August 2020. A month after what would have been the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. While Spotify lists the album’s name as SOUL LADY, the Hangul on the cover actually reads Seoul-yeoja—Seoul Lady.

I discovered YUKIKA around July, a few months into the Luzon lockdown. When SOUL LADY dropped a month later, I kept the entire album on loop for days on end. It is the convenient intersection of my interests: K-pop, Tokyo, and Seoul. Her songs, like most City Pop ballads, are about urbanite love and longing. But the whole album feels nostalgic. It liberally uses samples from things I never thought I’d miss: Airport announcements, the white noise of a crowd, and trains. To me, it sounds and feels like the joy that can only come from travel and discovery. The sound of a lost year compressed into 12 tracks.

SOUL LADY opens with a 49-second track called HND to GMP. At the first bell, the track rises with a soft string section of the main riff from NEON. and closes out with the sound of heels clicking on a hard floor that soon picks up into a run alongside the sound of an airplane taking off.

And from the silence come the drums of I FEEL LOVE, the second track. It feels like the first glimpse of a city from the window seat of an airplane. A groovy bassline, synth, and trumpets form the backbone of the track, as Yukika sings about falling in love on a sunny day. It sounds like I’m about to discover something new. It sounds a lot like hope. 

After coming off the high from the first three tracks, the fourth track Yesterday slows down a bit. The medium-tempo of the song takes it to the more melancholy territory of retro pop. Yukika sings about the fear and anxiety that plagues most new lovers: This love is great but what if it doesn’t work out? Gajang areumdaun haneureun, sarajigie sojunghan geolkka?

The tenth track on the album is called All flights are delayed, the antithesis to HND to GMP. It quietly opens with the announcement of an airport train arriving at Gimpo International Airport in different languages. It is the first and only time you hear Japanese on the whole album. If you followed the album from start to finish, this track sounds like a departure. At the 1:24 mark, Yukika sighs in a muffled voice, as if speaking over the phone. Doushiyou ka na, she asks. What should I do?

SOUL LADY topped the iTunes k-pop charts in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina, but not in the country all her songs are about: Korea. Translated from an interview in August, Yukika says: “It’s quite interesting how I’m getting attention from abroad when my stage is the Korea music industry… If given the chance, I’d love to be loved in Korea and Japan too.”

On November 30, ESTIMATE Entertainment announced that Yukika would not be renewing her contract with them. A month later, Yukika announced that she was signed under a company called Ubuntu Entertainment, a company set-up by her former manager.

This April, she came out with a new album entitled timeabout. A six-track album that still sounds a lot like her previous work. While I find it less memorable than SOUL LADY, Yukika remains to be one of my favorite new artists in recent memory. It’s the way her songs teleport me to a different city with each listen. A feeling I’ve sorely missed in a pandemic that has kept me largely inside.

— Written by Toni Potenciano

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