Ahn Ye-Eun has released her self-titled debut album on Pandawhale (YesAsia.com lists the publisher as Sony Korea, though). It's really good. If you didn't watch KPOP Star 5, you probably don't know who she is, and if you did watch it, you didn't know who she was until episode 11(!), because the show's producers kept expecting her to get sent home. Yeah, that never happened. She competed with her own compositions for the entire run of the show, only covering songs twice -- once during the team competition (the haunting rendition of IU's "Pink Shoes" with Woo Ye Rin) and during the final where the last two contestants had to do a song the other had performed during the run of the show.
The easiest way to describe her is the Korean Shiina Ringo, but that's short-hand at best, and does a disservice to both. She's a bit more conventional than Shiina, but still a bit out there. She's clearly a fan of the Beatles' later era. The one thing that bums me out about this album is that the whimsy she showed during KS5 is pretty much not present at all, and that was a really endearing element of her music for me. Still, it's a great album, and from a selfish perspective, I'm happy she was the runner-up, because I don't think she'd have an album out so soon had she won and been signed to Antenna.
The entire album is on Youtube, as are her performances from KS5, which I encourage everyone to check out.
Here's her first PV, "Somehow"
