On February 28, singer-songwriter Itzel has released her first EP album "b(e) light."
"b(e) light," a deeply personal and conceptually ambitious project spanning the Alternative Pop and Hip-Hop/Soul genres. The record captures something raw and unfiltered: the faces of those who keep walking toward the dying light, even as the world around them turns to ruin. On the surface, it reads as blight — a word for devastation, decay, and ruin. Split open, it becomes be light, a wish to hold each other long enough to get there.
The album finds its roots in Toward the Sunset (해가 지는 곳으로), a 2017 novel by celebrated Korean author Choi Jin-young. Rather than adapting the source material directly, Itzel uses it as a launchpad — expanding its world, then dismantling and rebuilding it through her own narrative and voice.
The result is something wholly her own: five chapters that unfold organically from dusk through the dead of night and into the first light of morning. Each track functions as a distinct movement within a single, continuous arc.
The EP's title track, 'Whoo,' sets the emotional and philosophical terms for everything that follows. It is not a redemption story in the conventional sense. There is no clean resolution, no blinding salvation waiting at the end of the road.
Instead, 'Whoo' is concerned with direction. With the act of choosing, over and over, to move toward the light rather than away from it. Fear and helplessness are acknowledged — not overcome, but navigated. The steering wheel, Itzel insists, is in your hands. Whatever darkness surrounds you, the choice of whether to drive out of it is yours.
The tracklist follows the movement of a single day at its most extreme — the final hours of light, the full weight of night, and the slow, hard-won arrival of morning. According to Itzel, this record is not meant to be read as her story alone. It is, she says, a portrait of anyone enduring this era.
Listen to "b(e) light"