IU returns with “Unknown Planet”, two songs she wrote herself
One year to the day after “Bye, Summer”, the South Korean singer and actor released a single with two lead tracks, both written by her.
IU, whose real name is Lee Ji-eun, released the digital single “Unknown Planet” on September 10, 2026 at 6 p.m. (Seoul time). It is her first musical release since “Bye, Summer”, which came out exactly a year earlier, on September 10, 2025.
The single carries two lead tracks, “Unknown Planet” and “Dear My Crazy Soulmate”, and IU wrote the lyrics of both. According to her agency, Edam Entertainment, the two songs will appear on her sixth studio album, whose release had been delayed for health reasons.
In Korean the single is called “이 별로부터”. Word for word, “from this star”; but in Korean “이별” also means a parting, and the title reads both ways.
The music video for “Dear My Crazy Soulmate”, in which she plays a police officer, came out with the single; the one for “Unknown Planet” was announced for the following Tuesday.
A singer who writes
IU debuted in 2008, at fifteen, with the EP “Lost and Found”. National fame came two years later with “Good Day”: five weeks in a row at the top of the Gaon Digital Chart and, in 2019, first place on Billboard’s list of the 100 greatest K-pop songs of the 2010s.
With “Palette” in 2017 she became the main lyricist and executive producer of her own album. She is now credited on more than seventy-six songs, for herself, for other artists or for series, and has thirty-one number-one singles, a record in South Korea.
An acclaimed actor
She has acted since the 2011 series “Dream High”. Her role in “My Mister” (2018) earned her a first Best Actress nomination at the Baeksang Arts Awards. In 2025, “When Life Gives You Tangerines”, a Netflix series written by Lim Sang-choon in which she stars opposite Park Bo-gum, became a hit in Korea and abroad.
That role won her Best Actress at the 4th Blue Dragon Series Awards in July 2025: the photo above was taken that evening. In spring 2026 she co-starred with Byeon Woo-seok in “Perfect Crown” (“21st Century Grand Prince’s Wife”), a romantic comedy set in a 21st-century South Korea that has become a constitutional monarchy, presented to the press on April 6 in Seoul.
Two years on stage
In 2024 her “HEREH” world tour took her across Asia, North America and Europe. The final concert, in September at Seoul World Cup Stadium, was the hundredth of her career and the first by a female musician in that stadium.
A year later she marked seventeen years of her career at Seoul’s KSPO Dome on September 13 and 14, 2025, a few days after “Bye, Summer”. “Unknown Planet” keeps that September date, ahead of the album.