Soyeon's Solo Song About Quitting Tops Melon on Day 10

On August 27 Soyeon put a photo of the Cube Entertainment building on her Instagram story and captioned it "퇴사할게여", roughly "I'll be quitting." Sports Kyunghyang wrote that the post could be read as a declaration of leaving her agency, and then worked out what it actually was by reading casting profiles on FilmMakers, where actor Lee Gyu-ho's 2026 credits listed "전소연(아이들)-퇴사할게여MV" and Park Seo-young's listed an office-worker role in an unreleased Jeon So-yeon project.

It was a music video title. Eleven days later it was the title track of her first full-length solo album, 끝내주는 인생, released September 7.

On September 17 at 8 a.m. KST, ten days after that release, it was No. 1 on Melon's TOP100.

What the title says, and why fans misread it

퇴사 (toesa) is the everyday Korean word for leaving a company. You use it when you hand in notice at a job. Korean does not use it for retirement, and it is not the word an artist would use for leaving an agency. What made the post readable as an exit notice was the building in the photo, not the word.

I would translate the ending carefully for you. The standard polite form here is -요; the -여 spelling is the softened internet version of it, the register you use in a group chat rather than on a form you file with HR. "I think I'll quit" sits closer to it than "I hereby resign."

The narration credit reads "퇴사할게여 (Narr. 기안84)". Casting him is a joke that lands instantly in Korea and needs a footnote everywhere else. Kian84 is the pen name of Kim Hee-min, described on Wikipedia as "a South Korean manhwaga and entertainer" — the webtoon artist behind Fashion King, and for overseas viewers more likely recognisable from the variety show I Live Alone, which the same entry says he has appeared on since 2016.

Who gets to sing about quitting

Before any of the chart numbers, there was an argument about the premise. Sports Kyunghyang ran a piece on September 10 under the headline "A rich idol resigning?", collecting the complaint that an idol with no office job cannot speak for 직장인, and readers asking why a wealthy idol would write this song at all.

Soyeon had answered it ahead of the release, and 경향신문 prints both lines. "직장인뿐만 아니라 모든 사람이 공감할 수 있는 이야기라고 생각한다" — she thinks it is a story not only office workers but everyone can relate to. She also said "안정적인 미래도 중요하지만 이 순간 행복했으면 한다는 이야기를 담았다". A stable future matters, and what she put in the album is the wish to be happy in this particular moment.

Eight days later she dealt with the other misreading on television. On KBS2's The Seasons on September 18 she said she had been afraid to put out a solo album because the responsibility would be hers alone, and that many people think she is leaving Cube when she is not.

I will say where I land on the first argument. The criticism assumes the song is a documentary about office life, and it is a sketch about the fantasy of quitting, which people with jobs and people without them both have. In the teaser Sports Kyunghyang described on September 5, Soyeon announces her exit while sprinkling salt in the office, shot on old CRT monitors in the grain of a 2000s Korean drama.

The chart run, in numbers

세계일보 listed the 8 a.m. KST positions on September 17: No. 1 on Melon's TOP100, No. 1 on Melon's HOT100, No. 1 on Genie's TOP200, No. 1 on Naver VIBE's TOP100, and No. 1 on FLO's all-ages chart. The previous day it was No. 1 on VIBE's daily chart and No. 8 on Spotify's Korea daily chart. Of that list, Spotify is the one I can open from outside a Korean account; Melon, Genie, VIBE and FLO all gate playback behind a Korean sign-up, which is why the domestic number and the number you see abroad never match.

The same report has the album past 750,000 yuan in sales on QQ Music, which 세계일보 calls China's largest music platform, and that figure (about 140 million won) is the threshold for its Triple Gold certification. Soyeon's own reaction to the domestic No. 1 led with "1위라니 믿기지 않는다" — she cannot believe it is No. 1 — before thanking listeners and the fandom.

When I read the 경향신문 piece on the afternoon of September 20 KST, the song was still at No. 1 on Melon's TOP100, day 13.

Ten days from release to the top of Melon is slow by K-pop standards, where a big title track either opens at No. 1 on the first evening or never gets there. A climb like this usually means the streaming came from outside the fandom, and 8 a.m. is the Korean commute.

What a Korean critic flagged

The 경향신문 piece quotes the popular-music critic 김도헌 (Kim Do-heon), who credits the writing rather than the concept: "전소연은 하나의 포인트를 뾰족하게 잘 전달하는 힘이 있는 아티스트", Jeon So-yeon is an artist with the power to deliver a single point sharply.

He does not leave it there. In the same piece he raises a worry about the run of idol self-produced albums now arriving, that an album handed entirely to its artist can drift into being too private to reach anyone, and his closing line is "앞으로의 앨범은 창작의 자유뿐만 아니라 음악으로 대중을 설득하려는 노력 또한 필요하다" — albums from here need creative freedom and an effort to persuade the public through the music, both.

Soyeon has said something adjacent about her own method. With i-dle she thought about how to present herself, and this time she produced the way she wanted. On EBS's 스페이스 공감 she described the record as "자연스러운 내 모습을 담았다", her natural self.

One note about the sourcing here. Some of the Sports Kyunghyang material above I read in that paper's English edition, so that wording is its translation, not mine — where I quote it (the September 10 headline) it is the English edition's own words. Anything in quotation marks is Korean I read in Korean.

The open question for me is whether the joke survives the border. In Korea, 퇴사 carries a specific 2020s weight — the resignation post, the exit interview, the colleague who left in March. If you are streaming this from outside Korea, I would like to know whether the office sketch reads at all without that, or whether you are just there for the hook and Kian84 sounding deeply unbothered over the intro.

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This is a running series, not a one-off post — a new post goes up every day, at around 5pm Korea time.

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