We Were

"We Were" is built around absence. The production has a stripped, dusky quality — gentle piano chords, minimal percussion that feels like footsteps in an empty apartment, and long reverb tails that make every note sound like it's being recalled rather than played in real time. Yerin Baek's vocal performance here is perhaps her most controlled and therefore her most devastating; she keeps the emotion compressed into a smaller register, which makes the occasional swell feel enormous by contrast. Her delivery carries the specific cadence of someone recounting rather than feeling — past tense has a different weight in the body, and she communicates that difference entirely through phrasing. The lyric explores a relationship not through its ending but through the strange double-existence of memory, where the people who loved each other still exist somewhere in the past tense even after the present has moved on. It doesn't ask for the other person back; it simply acknowledges that something real existed, and that its realness doesn't diminish with its ending. This sits within a lineage of Korean ballad-adjacent indie writing that treats romantic loss as a meditation on time rather than heartbreak. You listen to this in the hours after something has conclusively ended, when you're not yet ready to grieve but need to sit inside the fact of it — late autumn evenings, the last train home, a phone screen you've stopped checking.