ivy

K-Pop Spotlight: TWICE

TWICE has solved the age-old question of how to quantify love in their newest single and the formula is simple: it's the communication and support given between a group and their fans. Their 3rd full album "Formula of Love: O+T=<3" features a combination of brand-new units, multilingual tracks, and musical composition by the members themselves. We caught up with TWICE ahead of the release to chat about their new album and favorite school subjects, and to look back on the six busy and successful years since their debut. Check out our full interview below!

Tell us about your album "Formula of Love: O+T=<3" and the title track SCIENTIST, and how preparation differed from your first English single, The Feels.

NAYEON: Because this is our 3rd Full Album, we have planted some surprises for our fans like unit tracks and a track composed by our very own JIHYO. The title track SCIENTIST also conveys the charm of TWICE well, so I hope you enjoy listening to our album!

JIHYO: This album also consists full English tracks. Whereas we were so nervous recording The Feels to make the pronunciation perfect and deliver the meaning of the lyrics well to ONCEs, this time, the process felt more relaxed since we’ve done it once and since we know that ONCEs also enjoy English tracks.

"Formula of Love: O+T=<3" is your third full album and the latest in a long line of singles and mini-albums. How do you keep your sound fresh and decide which music genres to explore ahead of comebacks?

TZUYU: The wide variety of concepts help in keeping our sound fresh and deciding which mood would go well with that specific album. For example, for <Taste of Love>, the concept was about having a fun time and falling in love at first sight during a bright summer. That concept made our sounds more energetic, so that we can invite the listeners to dance along the music.

SANA: Similarly, for this album, the concept of studying about love as a scientist made us feel more serious, whilst maintaining the natural energy of TWICE. These two combinations surprisingly go well, so we are all very satisfied with how this album came out!

If love’s formula is the combination of ONCE and TWICE, what’s your favorite aspect of the relationship between you and your fans?

MOMO: I like how we communicate through online platforms, especially during times like this when we should be careful when meeting in-person. I love reading the comments and communicating through livestreams with fans. I wish we can keep this lively atmosphere and relationship with each other throughout the upcoming years as ONCE and TWICE!

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen within yourselves over the last 6 years both as performers and individuals?

JIHYO: The biggest change I’ve seen in myself over the last 6 years is that I am able to express myself in a wider range. I can see myself growing as an artist by participating more in the album making process. I’ve participated as a lyricist before, but through this album, I tried composing for the first time. The process was so new and exciting, and I hope my enthusiasm and love for this song gets transferred to the listeners.

The teaser photos for this album show TWICE in a chemistry classroom, but what were your personal favorite subjects when you were in school and why?

MINA: My favorite subject was Technology and Home Economics. I don’t know if other countries have this subject in their academic plan, but I learned it when I was in school and really enjoyed the classes. We got to learn new skills like knitting and did a bunch of DIY projects.

Tell us about the unit songs on this album and what types of genres we can expect.

DAHYUN: We have total of 3 unit songs, each consisting of three members. JIHYO, SANA, and my unit track, PUSH & PULL, experiments with the R&B/Soul genre that consists of funky up-tempo disco and 1980s vibe soul and hip-hop.

CHAEYOUNG: You’ll be surprised to hear NAYEON, MOMO, and my unit track, HELLO. It’s a rap/hip-hop song, which is completely different from the existing TWICE songs. It’s very powerful, so I hope ONCEs enjoy this new side of TWICE.

JEONGYEON: MINA, TZUYU, and my unit track, 1, 3, 2, explores sexy reggaeton groove in the genre of an addictive mid-tempo pop. It’s so addictive that you’ll hear the music on repeat in your head, just like I experienced ever since I heard this song for the first time.

When TWICE debuted 6 years ago, did you envision you’d be where you are now?

DAHYUN: My days have been filled with unexpected and pleasant surprises ever since I debuted as TWICE. I’ve never imagined that I would be receiving so many unconditional love from my fans. ONCE’s love makes my heart be filled with warmth and turns me into a more positive person. I keep on thinking of ways of return this overwhelming love to the fans and am always thankful that we are all in this together.

The phone call was with lt91updates on twitter:

https://twitter.com/1dinfectionarg_/status/836270665762234369?s=21

The story is that he DMed them and asked them to give him a number so he could do a conference call with them. I was a Larrie at the time and I know the entire sordid story.

Here is a former admin of the account talking about him following them on tumblr:

https://knightchanges.tumblr.com/post/157763110963/to-anons-he-followed-lt91updates-an-ig-i-run

Here she is admitting she’s on a group call…

https://knightchanges.tumblr.com/post/157763158258/u-dont-even-seem-excited-that-louis-followed-u-lol

She simply neglected to include that the phone call was also with Louis and that she wasn’t excited because he was telling them off on the phone. A friend of hers is who told me what he was saying in the phone call. She literally heard the audio that same day. I was lucky (my blog was tiny), most small and non-influential Larries never found out about this until it leaked almost a year later, but I’m willing to bet most big Larries knew exactly what was happening. I unlarried that same day.

Oh wow, thank you so much. Dang, this is good info, I appreciate you tracking this down! And I appreciate so much that it made you unlarry. As you say, most of the big Larries probably heard the whole thing and decided to keep lying to their followers and pretending it was fake.

So let me put together what I've got on The Phone Call, although I'm sure there are even longer recordings that larries have managed not to leak or that I just haven't found:

this sunbabyabby tik tok - with high quality audio of part of the call.

Transcript of the key parts: "So now I can talk to real fans about real shit, right? [UA: Yeah!] You know how much it grates on me daily, genuinely - and there's a lot, there's been shit on twitter before, but it genuinely [inaudible] puts me off twitter because of all these *crazy* lunatic larry fans. Oh. My. God. Guys. [UA: what happened?] I need to know right now if any of you believe in that."

Them saying yes makes things kind of super awkward lmao and Louis is taken aback and says he's "so disheartened" and says the type of person who would believe Larry is also the type of person who would record the call (since other recordings catch him asking them not to record it). (He was right about that...)

Some additional transcriptions without audio - and with extremely pathetic Larrie attempts to deny THE LITERAL WORDS FROM LOUIS'S MOUTH:

this debunkinglarry tik tok - which has caps of one of the admins of the update account saying the rest of the admins talked to Louis and recorded it but she slept through it. It also has some screenshots of Larries downplaying it after it was "leaked" in January 2018, saying that they "kept it quiet because spreading it would have meant playing in his team's hands" and just insisting it was fake with no proof. The person who says she slept through it was defending herself because people were mad at her for releasing the audio - weird to be mad at someone for that if they think it was fake and from Louis's team...

[edit now that this is already being reblogged, whoops - but just to close the loop, the person who slept through it was indeed associated with the same update account referenced below]

I've also seen Larries claim the audio was "indecipherable" and that the transcriptions were fake, which didn't age great now that better audio is out there. It's also telling that the big larries say "haven't we heard this all before" when it had obviously NOT hit the larger fandom before, and they're just remembering when they heard it privately and didn't share it.

And now these sources from the time of the call -

Louis following LouisT91Updates on twitter on Feb 26 or 27, 2017 (some posts show Feb 26th so it could be that, but the person's tumblr archive shows them as from the 27th so it could be a time zone thing):

One of the admins posting on tumblr that they'd gotten followed (weird zoom in an attempt to make it legible and capture the url in the cap lol):

And the same admin that night mentioning that "everyone in the US is on a group call rn (it's been over 40 min)"

Just to be clear these are from 2017, I popped into their archive:

As we know from the various recordings, Louis asked them to keep the call a secret so it makes sense that she wouldn't mention it. And, as my anon says, hearing Louis put down Larries might have muted their enthusiasm to the point where their anons notice...

So there we go. End of February 2017, Louis follows an update account, thinking he's supporting someone who supports him. Calls them on a group call, asks them not to record it, and gets real about Larry. Then some audio and transcriptions maybe leak out here and there in small ways, but it's basically kept under wraps until Jan 2018, at which point various quality of audio starts getting released for real, and we find out that Louis himself talked to Larries and told them how much he hates it.

That is Louis on that call, we know he spoke to this update account, and the way it's trickled out is 100% consistent with horrified Larries trying to hide it.

Of course her label could pursue legal action if she had a contractual obligation to perform a tour. Duh. Of course she’d have to ‘get an attorney’ if they pursued legal action against her, that’s how legal proceedings work. We do not know whether the label would win, or Ms Spears would win, because we are not adjudicating the case. It is no surprise to anyone on earth that if you sign a contract saying ‘I will perform x obligation’ and the other party relies on your performance and you breach contract, and they lose money, it may go to court.

Britney is not saying here ‘I was forced to tour and had no other option’. She is saying ‘they threatened me with legal action and that scared me and so I felt powerless’. As is quite clear in this moment, even someone who has been placed in a legal conservatorship, which Louis and Harry are not, even someone who explicitly has not got control of their personal finances or even their own reproductive organs, is able to go to court. Ms Spears has gone to court.

Not only does she have access to a court, but her story is publicly known. The whole world knows what’s happening to her. There are documentaries about it. There’s no cover up here. No one could silence her forever, despite how powerless she is.

How dare you use an example like Britney, someone who has suffered deeply and been deeply traumatised and abused, as some kind of twisted ‘evidence’ that this is happening to Louis Tomlinson. It’s not about him. Stop making the trauma of other people about your mlm fetish fantasy, you absolute weirdo.

Britney is the one who has claimed she has been drugged against her will. Britney is the one who has claimed she isn’t allowed children against her will. Britney is the one who has claimed decades of abuse. This. Is. Not. About. Your. Fetish.

And quite clearly, it’s not happening - he’s not under a conservatorship. Britney is more powerless than he is over his affairs, by definition, because she’s under one. And here she is, fully able to stand in front of a court and tell her story. Who is stopping Louis if Britney can do that, despite everything? It doesn’t make sense. It’s illogical.

Louis is literally now an independent artist and has strong control over every aspect of his career, including contract, and you’re going to pretend ~someone~ is somehow oppressing him more than Britney Spears? How? With the One Direction contract that was completed years ago? Or is it Syco, the company that literally no longer exists?

I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.

Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.

Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.

Red (Taylor’s Version) will be out November 19.

Well, for starters, they were always close friends. Let me repeat that again: Close. Friends. If I compared them to how my friends and I can act together, where we show affection to the other, not a single thing about it silently screams, “Hey, we’re in a secret relationship together because we are being closeted by our management team.”

It got the point where if they even glanced over at the other, you guys would freak out and make it into something much more than it is. They can’t talk to each other. Louis can’t publically wish Harry happy birthday or send it condolences about Robin without you guys screaming, “LARRY IS REAL!” Bitch, it’s not real, he’s being a good friend. All the other boys did the same thing and Narry and Lirry isn’t real? Harry was also affectionate as a friend with them as well, so how does that make sense?

They can’t even stand next to each other without it being “he wanted to stand next to him!” and if they are apart it’s “management won’t let them be next to each other!”

They can’t even be in the same continent or state without everyone freaking out and saying that they are Home™ and probably in bed together cuddling and watching Oprah, being so in love!

You guys made every interaction they’ve ever had with each other about some mentally constructed theory that has never been proven true, and has on numerous occasions actually been proven false – by Louis himself, I must add – and yet none of you guys will admit to it because it ruins this vision you guys have lived the past 8 years of your life around because it would be too embarrassing to do so.

You guys pushed them away from each other. You put a dent in their relationship because they can’t be friends without it being made into something it’s not.

If a large grouping of people labeled me – even after I asked them not to – and never listened to me or anyone when I would tell them we weren’t together – time and time again – and made hate accounts for my significant other, sending numerous death threats to my newborn baby, making things like Jay and Robin’s passings about Larry, then yes, it would put a slight damper on the friendship me and this person shares.

And if you can’t put yourself in their shoes and open your eyes and admit to yourself that you would feel the same, then there are things you are refusing to admit to yourself.