Twice’s Tzuyu on Her Passion for Releasing a Solo Album and Her Advice to Aspiring K-Pop Idols

“I always had a curiosity of what it would be like to work as a solo artist and create my own music and do my own stage performance, and that curiosity kind of developed into a certain level of passion for it,” Tzuyu explains through a translator on Zoom with The Hollywood Reporter.

The 25-year-old K-pop star is the youngest member of global sensation Twice. Having debuted in 2015, Tzuyu and the rest of the nine-member group have spent the last nearly nine years growing in front of the public eye.

Throughout their career, Twice, once dubbed the nation’s girl group, has topped Korean music charts and the Billboard 200, sold out stadiums around the world and, in recent years, branched out into solo work and sub-groups for its members.

Tzuyu is the third member of the group to go solo, following two albums from the group’s eldest member Nayeon and one album from the group’s leader Jihyo. Much like her fellow group members with their solo efforts, Tzuyu is hoping that her debut EP, abouTZU, will offer Twice fans, known collectively as Once, a chance to see a side of herself that they haven’t seen before.

Tzuyu says the process began after she asked her label, Korean entertainment company JYP Entertainment, about the possibility of releasing solo work and they agreed. “Since this was my first album, I felt a lot of challenges,” she says.

“I got a lot of support from the members and that helped me out a lot,” she continued, shouting out the other members of Twice. “Through working with my label, we tried to show many different [and] new sides of me in this album.”

The EP’s first song, “Run Away,” serves as the album’s lead single. The synth-pop track is addictive and offers Tzuyu a chance to showcase the more mature side of her performance skills. The 25-year-old looks elegant in the haunting music video.

“As a Twice member and as a solo artist, I want to be someone that fans are naturally drawn to and very charming. That’s what I aspire to be,” Tzuyu says of how she wants fans to view her work on the album. “I hope my songs and my stage performances provide some sort of help and energy to our fans all around the world.”

Among Tzuyu’s favorite tracks on the six-song album, “Fly” and “Lazy Baby” sit at the top of the list. “Fly,” a beautiful ballad written by the 25-year-old, is seemingly quite meaningful to the singer. “This is the first time that I solely wrote the lyrics by myself,” she says.

“It tells my story really well,” she continues. The song acts as an inspirational message for her and her fans with opening lyrics of “You give me wings to fly again” before later declaring “Anyway I’m gonna try / You are the reason why, ’cause I-I-I / I know I’m alive.”

During Twice’s recent fifth world tour, the members were able to showcase their individual talents through solo stages. Tzuyu, having previously performed a dance-oriented performance, opted to sing a ballad at their recent encore shows in Japan. “Fans reacted very positively because they got to see me in a different light and their reaction really gave me a lot of courage and energy to try more new things in the future,” she explains.

“Lazy Baby,” which Tzuyu says she hopes to perform on stage, features Korean-based American rapper pH-1. The fun and “quirky,” as Tzuyu puts it, song is a standout on the album with a chorus that repeats “I’m a lazy baby” and has lyrics that both students and workers can relate to: “What you gonna do? Nothing / When you gonna do it? Not yet.” The singer feels it’s “just so different from the title song.”

Tzuyu says throughout the process of creating an album, she watched other female solo artists and gained inspiration from them. In terms of personal musical favorites at the moment, the singer says she listens to Celine Dion “a lot” and “really loves” Korean singer Yerin Baek. Her favorite movie, at least at that moment, is the 2013 Rachel McAdams film About Time. “It’s so romantic, and at the same time, it gives me a chance to imagine what I would do if I could turn back time,” she adds.

As Twice approaches their ninth anniversary as a group, Tzuyu is able to look back on her career and offer a world of advice to anyone hoping to have their own K-pop career. “Preparing my solo album, I had a lot of worries and fears, but this has been my dream for a really long time, so I made a firm decision to become more courageous and to do the best as I can,” she begins.

“My advice for younger people who aspire to be idols, or my younger self, is to have no fear if you have dreams to pursue,” she continues. “Everything is an experience, good or bad.”

The singer assures hopefuls that they’ll learn plenty along the way. “Just go ahead and have no fear,” Tzuyu says. “That’s my advice.”