Lee Sung Soo, CEO of SM Entertainment, revealed why aespa’s comeback got delayed.
On Thursday, Lee Sung Soo posted a video on his YouTube channel in which he made radical claims against SM’s founder Lee Soo Man. One of the topics that he brought up was aespa’s delayed comeback.
Lee Sung Soo explained that Lee Soo Man has been stressing “planting trees” and “sustainability” – which means holding K-pop festivals in different countries like planting trees – lately. But according to his claims, this is merely the way Lee Soo Man chose to fulfill his desire for real estate business, and to make matters worse, the construction of the music city Lee Soo Man is planning includes casinos and legalizing marijuana.
So how does this relate to aespa’s comeback? Lee Sung Soo explained, “aespa’s new album was scheduled to come out around February 20th. Their first concert was scheduled to be held on the 25th and 26th in line with the release of their new album.” He went on, “Lee Soo Man ordered the producers to write lyrics that project this ‘planting trees’ campaign he’s been pushing for since last year, even when it didn’t fit at all with the group’s concept we worked so hard on in creating.”
“Words like ‘just sustainability,’ ‘lowering by 1 degree,’ ‘win-win,’ and ‘greenism’ were added in the lyrics. And actually earlier on, the lyrics even included ‘planting trees,’ which made the aespa members upset and all choked up,” Lee Sung Soo recalled. “Every department was given an impossible mission to connect the existing worldviews and teams’ color with the lyrics that didn’t match these. And this absurd direction resulted in content that no one could relate with. So we, the co-CEOs, decided to cancel the release of aespa’s new song.”
Lastly, he added, “aespa members, our production departments, and the A&R team are preparing new songs and content that we poured our heart and soul into. We’ll announce aespa’s comeback soon.”
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