Nearly two decades into one of K-pop’s most distinctive careers, Sunmi is doing what she once viewed as too risky, too heavy and, perhaps most consequentially, too revealing: releasing her full debut album.
“I’ve always dreamed of releasing a full-length album,” she says, reflecting on a milestone many would have assumed she had already reached. “But for female solo artists, it can feel like quite a risk — it’s different from being part of a big group with a huge fanbase behind you. So, I was hesitant at first. It takes so much time, energy, and so many people — not to mention, it’s a big financial commitment.”
If anything, HEART MAID arrives not as her debut statement but as a culmination of her artistic life up to now — a personal audit that the 33-year-old calls the “perfect moment” to look back. “It’s been almost 19 years since I debuted with Wonder Girls, and around 12 years since I started my career as a solo artist. I wanted to take a moment to look back at my journey — to reflect on my music…to understand myself better as an artist, and reorganize.”
HEART MAID is an album she built from the inside out. Sunmi entirely writes the 13-track record and is credited as a co-producer on every track, with its origin story a classic Sunmi tale: cinematic, conceptual, with a touch of surreal and silly.
The ending credits of her 2023 “STRANGER” music video initially planted the conceptual seeds in her imagination, showing her in a maid outfit, picking up a nail and placing it in her ear “as if it were a Bluetooth earpiece.” Soon, the idea of HEART MAID — a maid not of domestic chores but of emotional caretaking — began to take shape. “Ever since then, I couldn’t stop thinking about the concept,” she says during a sit-down video chat in Seoul. She began revisiting old songs, crafting new work, and singles like “Balloon in Love” and “BLUE!” were “an important bridge” to begin the album, with their sonic fabric noticeably distinct from the boldness of her previous singles.
That shift wasn’t incidental, but a recalibration and reexamination of all the things Sunmi had come to represent.
“Over time, I realized that not only my audience had grown used to a certain image of my music — strong, performance-driven songs,” Sunmi explains. “Not only that, I got used to it. And I felt the need, and contemplated on how, to break free from that mannerism.” Her B-sides, she says, always told a different truth — “more intimate, personal… filled with personal emotions, sometimes coming from somewhere low or darker.” She points to an upbeat track like “Siren” paired with darker tracks like “ADDICT,” “Black Pearl” and “Secret Tape” for 2018’s critically acclaimed WARNING EP. Sunmi sought ways to fuse that interiority with a project that would boast public-facing appeal and be hers to call her own.
That emotional tension sits at the center of “CYNICAL,” the album’s main single and a track that sprouted from Sunmi’s own gentle pushback against the hardening she sees around her in the industry and generally in life.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a cynical person,” she explains. “But you know, in life and in work, I often encounter people who are cynical — and it can be hurtful at times.” Her instinct isn’t further confrontation or dismissing their feelings, but an invitation to take a breather: “Let’s not be so serious, relax a bit… let’s smile together.”
That compassion leads her to a broader perspective. She continues, “It really feels like the world has become cynical… maybe cynicism becomes a kind of defense mechanism — a way to protect ourselves. Life is harsh and stuffy. But I wanted to say, ‘Even in this harsh world, let’s just smile, and get through each day — one day at a time.’”
The accompanying music video extends that message through the lens of Korean folklore. Sunmi portrays a “female virgin ghost,” a figure traditionally associated with wrongful death and lingering sorrow, but she decides to subvert the archetype. “The virgin ghost character is meant to be ‘cynical,’ [but] asks, ‘Hey, why are you so cynical?’ And that’s the irony,” she says with a quiet satisfaction. “If someone watches this on their phone, sees my movements and facial expressions, thinks ‘Yo, Sunmi is doing something weird again’ and laughs, then that’ll be enough. I hope this can give them a moment to laugh.”
One of her earliest visual ideas involved the ghost flicking a flashlight on and off in rhythm with the song — an image she assumed her team would reject, only to find they embraced it enthusiastically. “Since then, it’s been a true collaboration with the entire team.” Indeed, the final message on Sunmi’s ghoulish visual leaves the viewer with her ghost’s final message, “‘Life lasts longer in laughter than in cynicism.’ People still remember her words and keep on smiling.”
SUNMI for ‘HEART MAID’
ABYSS COMPANY
That sense of quirky world-building connects back to HEART MAID as a whole — the album’s concept photos see Sunmi in a maid outfit, boxing gloves, barbed wire, even wielding a cart of grenades. “[It’s] as if I’m saying, ‘You hurt the ones I love?…’” she explains. “This is how I expressed it.”
Both avatars of protection, guardianship, and an emotional armor of sorts, Sunmi sees the ghost and maid characters as part of the same universe. “As I used the idea of the virgin ghost to express ‘CYNICAL.’ HEART MAID was inspired by the idea of a maid that doesn’t take care of home and domestic chores, but takes care of the heart.”
The 13-song tracklist digs even deeper with Sunmi pouring over with consideration for which tracks she’s most curious to know listener feedback after keeping some songs for years in her journals: “Sweet nightmare,” “Bath” and “Happy af” (with Sunmi not bothering to censor herself, calling the song “Happy as Fuck”).
“Sweet nightmare” returns to her beloved synth-pop palette, which she conquered with commercial and critical favorites “Pporappippam” and “TAIL,” but through a new prism, one born with time and considered self-assurance. “This time, I wanted to capture and express that sound in a slightly more chaotic way — reflecting the paradox within the title itself. There’s no such thing as a sweet nightmare.”
“Bath” is deceptively sensual until you read the description she attached to the track: “Do not contact outside of work hours.” The track is actually an emotional reset ritual and ode to self-care where Sunmi is “washing away the emotional grime that builds up from social and professional life…and with a freshly soft and renewed heart, you step back into the world again. The last line is ‘Please let me breathe awhile, so I can smile at you again / Dirty tears, push you away.’”
Meanwhile, “Happy af” wants to uncover the masks we wear day after day. “It can suggest that you’re not actually happy,” she says of the expletive title. She points to her penned words: “‘I don’t want to open it, it might ruin the world / Like the soda I just dropped / Bang, it bursts (Pung, pung, pung) / I just wanted to be happy.’ The lyrics sound playful, but when you listen, it saddens you as well.” Sunmi takes several minutes of the interview to ensure this lyric is adequately explained and understood by both this reporter and her media team’s translator. It’s part of Sunmi’s specialties: hammering a point until it’s clear, while also wanting to ensure her art can be of aid to listeners. She adds that the song “can make you reflect on your own emotions. I’m really curious to see how people will respond to that.”
To this point, the album’s emotional focal point extends far beyond its tracklist. HEART MAID is the sound of a person who has truly survived — and thrived — long enough to now care for others.
“I didn’t think I would be doing music for this long,” she admits while reflecting on the 15 years since she and her girl group Wonder Girls broke new ground when they became the first K-pop act to enter the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in late 2009. “There are moments I did well, but I must have had moments that maybe weren’t my best. But these are all the moments that came and made me. That made Sunmi.”
Yet Sunmi’s creation wasn’t a gentle molding. She speaks politely, but with an undeniable emotional and honest gravity, opening up how that debuting so young meant she “didn’t go through puberty” until her early twenties — a period she now describes as “a dark time.”
“I didn’t know what I liked,” she shares. “When people asked me, ‘Who is Sunmi as a person?,’ I couldn’t answer. In philosophy, that’s what you call the ego — and mine was in chaos. At that time, I decided I needed to dissect and understand who I really was.”
On her path of self-discovery outside of work, she ironically leaned into one of the true markers of K-pop. She followed the ways of her devoted fans — affectionately known as Miya-ne, which translates to Sunmi’s home — and Sunmi became her own biggest fan.
“In K-pop, we call it deokjil, so I started doing deokjil on myself,” referring to the word for being and engaging as a passionate fan of something, whether that’s memorizing every trivia fact about your favorite idol or cheering them on in concert or online. “When fans do deokjil, they find out things like ‘What my bias hates most,’ ‘what they love the most,’ their little habits when they’re nervous; I began uncovering those things about myself, one by one. As I went through that process, that kind of music naturally began to come out.” That introspection led to her 2021 song “Borderline,” where her personal dissection of her borderline personality disorder led to a revelation.
“I’ve always found it difficult to communicate my emotions honestly to others,” she shares. “But in ‘Borderline,’ I shared my personal story openly — raw and without restraint. And after releasing that song, I had an extraordinary experience. I didn’t write the piece to comfort anyone else; I wrote it to comfort myself. But when I sang it during my world tour, so many fans resonated with it; they ‘felt’ it and found healing and comfort through it. That amazed me; that something I made purely for myself, the emotions I once struggled to control, could become solace and comfort for others. The emotions that had once been so hard for me to control were now finally able to be controlled.”
That’s the person behind HEART MAID: An artist who had to mend herself before taking on anyone else’s hurt. “Now, I have a space in my heart that allows me to care for the emotions of others,” she says. “And that’s how I was able to create this album.”
In one of the interview’s final moments, Sunmi becomes humbly thoughtful — but never truly embarrassed or shy — about her own growth. “Being an artist who can offer empathy and comfort through music…ah, calling myself an ‘artist’ feels a bit cheesy,” she says with a laugh. “But that’s the kind of singer I was able to become.”
She then offers something quietly gut-wrenching: “These 19 years of time are Sunmi as a person because I only pursued music, and my way of expressing my emotion was always through music. I dug deep into this… All these emotions of 19 years are in my discography. So, that’s why I would like to define it as my life itself and Sunmi as a person.”
Once the hour-plus-long chat flies by, she adds one last note — the kind you tuck away in your own heart as a reminder that artists do see and recognize what’s said about them, no matter where it’s shared. “I sincerely appreciate you for always supporting and cheering me on,” she says. “And somehow, Jeff, you always remind me that I’m not just speaking into the void; that there’s someone truly listening.”
HEART MAID is Sunmi listening back to herself, to her past, and to the world she hopes might soften, heal, and laugh with her. It’s an album of care, made from care, and — as the title’s double meaning implies — truly heart made.