A new, multilingual, all girls K-pop band, TRI.BE, made its debut with the two-song album TRI.BE Da Loca recently, featuring a mix of some intriguing genres that the world does not usually associate with K-pop.
The seven-member troupe is jointly produced by K-pop songwriter Sinsadong Tiger and Universal Music Group. The septet includes Songsun, Jihna, Kelly, Hyunbin, Jia, Soeun and Mire, the two tracks in the album are the lead single ‘Doom Doom Ta’ and the synth-pop track ‘Loca’.
In a statement, Tiger says that he “wanted to produce something that was a mixture of non-mainstream genres in K-pop” such as Afrobeat, baile funk, dancehall. “This type of production will serve as a major path indicator for TRI.BE’s future musical direction as well as the first step in engraving TRI.BE’s position and identity within K-pop,” he adds.
One of TRI.BE’s members, Jinha, remarks that the band aims to lead the music charts, adding that they would model themselves after the more prominent K-pop girl group, BLACKPINK. “Their performances are always cool, and we are inspired by how they perfectly showcase a variety of concepts,” Jinha says.
The band’s name is derived from a combination of the words triangle and being. “The group conveys the message of self-love and confidence by unapologetically flaunting their key concept — Girl swag,” the lead vocalist Songsun says. Whilst the band is all girls, its members are not all Korean. TRI.BE, interestingly, is a multilingual group of performers including four Korean, one Japanese and two Taiwanese artistes; the latter two can sing in English, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. The band is currently starring in a reality series titled Let’s Try! be on Studio Lululala’s YouTube channel.