In terms of charting performance I was surprised that it didn’t do so well. Ice Cream only got about as high as 200 on Melon chart and then dropped. If you look at old reddit posts from 2-3 years ago about “Which 4th gen idol would be successful as a soloist” you see Yuna’s name come up a LOT and getting a lot of upvotes. And honestly I can see where they’re coming from because I can easily imagine Yuna with a big solo “it girl” presence given her performance skills, style and striking visual. But for some reason it kind of made no noise.
As for why that is, part of it probably has to do with her group not really being at the forefront of the public’s attention at this point with the lack of recent hits. But another thing I noticed was that the performances were kind of lacking, at least for me. The first one I watched was her Music Core performance (april 4th). Stage presence-wise it was really not giving much.
Yuna is someone who I think has pretty good stage presence when performing with ITZY, and people may disagree but she really seemed kind of flat up there. Another issue is the performance was just straight lipsync, which I found disappointing given ITZY’s reputation but is not unheard of for a solo music show stage. I also checked Music Bank and it was the same. But anyway, I would’ve expected more in terms of expressiveness, playing to the crowd and camera and so on given she didn’t have to worry about singing. I’ve seen this a few times before now where idols with normally good stage presence in a group don’t really command the stage when they go solo. It may be something that will improve over time though as she gets more used to it.
Other than that she could have used a better song. Ice Cream isn’t bad, but not exactly stand out kind of catchy. Just a really straightforward basic pop song. IMO their company should have been more daring with Yuna’s solo debut song and done more to make her stand out, but instead just played it really safe with everything from the music to the promos/stages. It was giving off “lets get this solo debut out there and sell some albums” rather than “lets make our idol a solo star”.
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