K-pop group RIIZE on the dark side of success: ‘Fame isn’t everything’

As they release their rage and trip-hop-tinged sophomore EP, FAME, the K-pop six-piece talk fans, ‘emotional pop’ and how they’re learning to deal with celebrity

During RIIZE’s first US tour this summer, group members Anton (bass) and Wonbin (guitar) joined forces for an extended intro to their debut single, 2023’s “Get A Guitar”. It wasn’t the first time the song had been given such treatment, nor a first for the two RIIZE members to flex their playing skills, but what emerged through the sound system was more compelling, richer, bluesier and funkier than it’d ever sounded before, the members visibly more melded with their instruments.

“I’ve always been a fan of funk musicians like Pino Palladino,” Anton tells Dazed over a Zoom call post-dance rehearsal, surrounded by his bandmates. “But that rock/bluesy intro was a really cool way to start that section of our concert. If we had more opportunities to explore that sound and bring it to K-pop, I think that’d be cool.” 

The fun thing about RIIZE – Shotaro, Eunseok, Sungchan, Wonbin, Sohee, and Anton - is that nothing ever seems off the table, and a foray into blues-tinged rock could very well be just over the horizon. Since their debut, they’ve explored the music landscape with a wide net, with their first mini-album, RIIZING, and first album, ODYSSEY, carefully plucking and pruning inspiration from the 20 or so years of music produced at their label, SM Entertainment. Scuzzy electronica and deliberately over-produced vocals sat alongside classic boy band sweetness, and honking EDM gave way to nostalgic slap bass. The moment you think you have RIIZE’s sound pinned, the Houdini their way out of that pigeonhole a second later. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, then, that their new EP FAME (for which the concept trailer was shot at Kent’s historic Linton Park estate) sounds nothing like where they’ve been before, and that its three songs are, sonically, at complete odds with each other. The lyrics needle at celebrity, its lure and gloss, and its distortive, anxiety-inducing capabilities. RIIZE have been here before (“Show Me Love, “Another Life”, Fly Up”), teeth jittering against the subject like on a particularly sharp hangnail.

And yet, somehow, FAME is startling: “Something In The Water” nods to 90s trip hop and Air’s sultry Moon Safari, while the taproot of “FAME” is rage, the trap sub-genre pioneered by Trippie Redd and Playboi Carti, and rounding the trio out is “Sticky Like”, which, for a moment, could have been on a Bieber album but balloons into a drum-driven ride of twinkling pop and big – really big – vocals. This might not be, as Wonbin says, the start of their “new chapter”, but it’s about to be one hell of an era.

“Something In The Water” is a gorgeous, intense song. When you first heard it, what did you picture in your mind?

Sohee: Like there was this really big pond of transparent water, and one drop of black ink, like you can see it fall into the water and the dye spreads, that’s what came to me.

Eunseok: For me, I felt like I was deep underwater, like deep down in the sea, that’s the kind of emotion it evoked for me.

This is a new sound for you that delves into trip hop and space pop – are these genres that you were familiar with?

Anton: The instrumental is sort of like that style, but the vocal melody itself is almost reminiscent of R&B. When I first heard it, [I thought] while it may not be necessarily super unique or new, it was a style of music that I hadn’t really heard before in K-pop, so I thought it was a good opportunity for us. SOHEE’s image of the song is a pretty good representation of it, like the mood of the song is almost eerie. It’s calm but not in a peaceful way.

When you’ve got a clear juxtaposition – here, eerie and sultry – how do you work with that in the studio to find the balance?

Shotaro: What came first for me was not the creepiness but that the vocals needed to be very delicate. I thought it was very dream-like, and I felt that eerie, dark side the members mention when I was listening [again]. There are lyrics like, ‘Why am I still here alone?’ – it’s really about inner insecurities, so I wanted to really delve into that too, and tried to add all those nuances to the song when recording. 

When prepping for something you’ve never done sonically, what’s the process to get into the zone?

Shotaro: My process before recording ‘Something’s In The Water’, or when we have something new, is to listen to a lot of music, think about the lyrics I’m inspired by and look at the artists the song reminds me of, and I try to use that energy in my recording. For this, it was The Weeknd, Justin Bieber and DEAN.

You’ve openly addressed that darker side of yourselves. What do you see now when you look inwards? 

Anton: Since our debut, we’ve made music about ‘rising’ and ‘realising’ our dreams, what came before in our trainee days, and the struggles related to that. This time, and it being the first songs since then, we wanted to explore topics that are related to what we feel having achieved fame, whether it be struggles or emotions about fame itself. All three songs are connected by that.

“FAME” says ‘All this fake fame, maybe I don’t need it’, and ‘Shout, loud, cry, tears, fear, pain but keep going, all I did it for, my love, not fame’. Do you have a dislike of fame or being famous?

Sohee: No.

Wonbin: [Laughs] We love being famous.

What does it mean then to sing those lines but actually enjoy where you’re at as a famous pop star?

Sohee: On Odyssey, there’s ‘Fly Up’, and in that, we also say, ‘I don't need no fame’, so we’re expanding on that. We’re not saying fame is bad, we need that as artists. It’s critical to keep making more albums. But there’s more to becoming great artists than just fame, and I think we’re in the process of learning what really matters. It could be loving yourself, caring for people around you, including your fans, but we know that fame isn’t everything. It’s really important that you don’t lose your grasp on yourself, to hold onto my true self.

Being famous is good but it shouldn’t be the end goal. You just have to work really hard in your area of expertise and when you do it really well, people start to recognise you

“FAME” also says ‘Shout out for your name’, which seems to allude to your point of keeping a grip within the myriad of challenges that also come with being famous.

Anton: I’m chasing a higher version of myself rather than fame. Like in the beginning of the chorus, there’s a line that says ‘Running towards you’, and I saw ‘you’ as myself.

Sungchan: I thought ‘you’ was our fans. Being famous is good, but it shouldn’t be the end goal. You just have to work really hard in your area of expertise and when you do it really well, people start to recognise you. It’s not just our profession; it could be anyone – you work hard to get that acknowledgement, and it could be something we call ‘fame’, but really it’s just that acknowledgement from people.

The EP’s concept video was beautiful – a very old world, period piece – but since I’m yet to see FAME’s, describe it in one word…

Wonbin: [Laughs] We haven’t seen the final cut yet!

Shotaro: I really like the intro. We’re all there, but Anton kicks it off, and I love the studio and the colour grading, so stay tuned.

Anton: We shot the intro in one take, and the members are all doing their own thing. Hopefully, it makes the cut because it was fun to shoot.

If Odyssey was like your first book of stories, then is FAME like a novella? How would you define this era?

Wonbin: Right now, we’re in between our chapter one and chapter two. I think Odyssey and everything else we’ve done so far is all about growing, going up the staircase, and if we had a snapshot for that album, it would be like cheering ourselves on and being very energised. But if FAME were a snapshot, it’d be of the introspectiveness we had as we were preparing for this album, it would be one taken behind the scenes.

Since your debut, you’ve described RIIZE’s genre as ‘emotional pop’ but also consistently experimented to the point of not having an easily definable sound. Two years in, is genre a necessity? If so, why’s ‘emotional pop’ still the best fit?

Eunseok: We’re trying to pour our own stories and emotions into our songs, [that’s what] we think of as the emotional pop genre. I think of it as a big tree where there could be different fruits hanging from it and all of those are different stories and emotions. People love all of them, all of their differences. This love, the exchange of that love, that’s why we should work to be better artists, and not just run towards fame. We exist because our fans exist.

FAME is out now.

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