Yves ‘VIOLA’ Music Video Thumbnail - YouTube
Having a song go so incredibly viral on TikTok is quite common nowadays, but it’s rare when that song comes from a K-pop artist. It’s even rarer when this K-Pop artist is so new to the scene.
It’s very likely that you’ve Yves’ song “DIM” on your TikTok for-you-page, but do you know who Yves is?
Hailing from one of K-pop’s greatest girl groups, LOONA, comes Yves, a once-in-a-generation talent creating interesting and powerful music. Being such an incredible vocalist as well as dancer, it’s no surprise that Yves would decide to go solo after Loona’s temporary disbandment (learn more about it and some of the other Loona members here).
Ha Soo-young, professionally known as Yves, was born May 24, 1997, in Busan, South Korea. Throughout her childhood, she had always loved singing and dancing, which would lead her to join a dance troupe while in High School. Her skill in dancing would then get her a position as a trainee at her first agency, BlockBerry Creative.
Yves’ career in music started on Nov. 28, 2017, when she joined Loona as the ninth member with her solo song “new”. Later that year, she would join Loona’s third subunit, LOONA yyxy. In August of 2018, Loona finally made their 12-member debut with the song “Hi High” and the accompanying album “[+ +].” Loona promoted together as 12 for about 5 years before disbanding.
To make a long story short, Loona was a 12-member girl group under their agency Blockberry Creative, who kicked out one of the members, Chuu, because she had reached a point in her solo career where she could support herself without the company. Soon after, the other 11 members filed to terminate their contracts and leave Blockberry Creative. After a long legal battle, every single member won their case, and now the former members of Loona have formed two new groups, ARTMS and Loossemble, each with five members, and the remaining two members, Yves and Chuu, have gone solo.
Yves’ solo career with her second label started on May 29, 202,4, with the release of her EP “LOOP,” which would later create the momentum for Yves to be able to release her second EP “I Did” featuring the song “DIM.”
The trend involving Yves’ song “DIM” seems to have started with Yves’ fans posting videos of her when she was still part of Loona to the outro/instrumental portion of “DIM” with the signature line of the trend, ‘She doesn’t know it yet but…’ and then something along the lines of ‘she will be a great solo-artist one day’ or ‘her bandmate will be kicked out of the group and the course of her life will be changed indefinitely.’
Orbits (fans of Loona) also used the song to share old videos of the other 11 Loona members in a similar fashion, with a few of these videos going semi-viral in the K-pop sphere.
Many fans of other musical artists then continued this trend, similarly posting old videos of their favorites right before something either fantastic or absolutely awful happened to them.
This trend then continued to evolve, becoming a way for people to share basically any kind of story with the format being ‘he/she doesn’t know it yet but …’ and then either an accomplishment, funny or traumatic moment.
After a few viral videos with this trend, all using Yves’ “DIM” as the audio, the trend went absolutely viral, with “DIM” being the #1 most used audio on TikTok for a few days and trending in TikTok’s Top 50 most used songs for a few more weeks. Then, basically every corporation, influencer, famous person, and politician used “DIM” and participated in the trend.
“DIM” had become a uniquely viral song in which everyone had heard it, but the vast majority of people who knew of the song’s existence had no idea who the artist was behind the song, or even what the song was called.
Soon after, like all trends do, this one fell off after a few weeks, but fans of both Yves and Loona will always remember when Yves’ song went #1 on TikTok.