On Attaching Six Colours to a Thirteen-Minute Album

The length of an album is also the size of the vessel.

Fill ten tracks and you can lay out many sides of a person; at six you have to choose. Ryu Su-jeong's fourth mini album is six songs, 13 minutes and 16 seconds. And inside it there are six colours.

What we know

Item	Detail
Artist	Ryu Su-jeong
Album	Fourth mini album 'ALL THE COLORS I AM' (6 tracks)
Release	September 11, 6pm
Title track	'Diamond'
Total length	13 minutes 16 seconds
Tracks	'Crying to' · 'Diamond' · 'Lucky Charms' · 'shoulda woulda coulda' · 'Birthday Cake' · 'Friendly Fire'
Label	all my anecdotes · distributed by YG PLUS

Six songs, six colours

Ryu Su-jeong assigned a colour to each of the six songs. 'Diamond' is ice blue, 'Crying to' is black, 'Lucky Charms' is the yellow-green of a four-leaf clover, 'Friendly Fire' is red, 'Birthday Cake' is purple, 'shoulda woulda coulda' is yellow.

The album is called 'ALL THE COLORS I AM', so the structure is six colours gathering into one person. Assign one per song and the whole album becomes a list of colours.

Ryu Su-jeong put it this way: "I always went back and forth between the me who likes dressing up and the me who likes bare-faced naturalness, but making this album I fully accepted that all these different colours together make 'me'."

Six songs, six videos

The plan is to make music videos for all six tracks, release them in sequence, and then complete a single narrative with a combined version. Two have come out so far — 'Crying to' on September 10 and 'Diamond' yesterday.

Six videos for six songs makes the visual side larger than the recording. That much screen is being attached to a thirteen-minute album.

The singer's own account: "I thought we'd only shoot one, then it suddenly became six and we shot them all in two days."

A deck rebuilt after cutting four of five

Five songs had been prepared. All but one — 'Lucky Charms' — were dropped, and the deck was rebuilt.

"The songs we threw out were bright summer-feeling songs with performance elements. There was a seasonal limit too, and talking with the company and staff the view came together that a pretty, dressed-up Ryu Su-jeong is good, but this time let's show a completely different possibility — the raw Ryu Su-jeong — all at once," the singer said.

Dropping four songs for a six-track album is a decision to remove finished work. Short, dense songs came into the space that opened. Five of the six run under three minutes.

Someone who worked alone, then chose a team

Last year Ryu Su-jeong personally ran a one-person label and made an album alone. This album came out through all my anecdotes, where the singer signed this September.

"Last year, running an independent label, I tried making an album alone. It was hard but it was really fun. The company now respected that process when they made their offer, and the grain matched, so we came together," Ryu Su-jeong said.

The company reached out first. "After my previous label contract ended I posted on social media that I was working alone, and they contacted me," the singer said. Executive producer Lee Hae-in telling Ryu Su-jeong that the producer "wanted to open up another possibility in Su-jeong" was where the contract began.

Tonight, like this

Play the six in order first. At six songs in thirteen minutes, the next one arrives before the last has settled. That speed is the first thing to check.

Then play them again holding each song's colour in mind. Confirm how ice blue, black and red differ as sound.

Last, wait for the other four videos. The singer said the six together make one story.

Six colours in thirteen minutes. 'ALL THE COLORS I AM'.