IVE Part 2 — Eleven Was Just the Beginning: The Breakthrough Year
Between December 2021 and August 2022, IVE released three consecutive hits — two of them reaching #1 in Korea. Then they swept year-end daesangs with a song from their first year as a group. This is how IVE became one of the defining girl groups of the 4th generation.
Between their December 2021 debut and the end of 2022, IVE released three singles that would come to define the group.
Two of them — “Love Dive” and “After Like” — went to #1 on Korea’s national singles chart. The debut song “Eleven” peaked at #2.
One of them — “Love Dive” — was named Song of the Year at four major award ceremonies simultaneously. It wasn’t even their debut song. They had only been a group for one year.
At the end of that year, IVE stood at a podium at the Melon Music Awards and accepted the Daesang — the grand prize, the highest honor in Korean music. They had been a group for exactly 360 days.
It was the third fastest a girl group had ever won a Daesang after debut. And they weren’t done.
📌 This is Part 2 of a 4-part IVE series.
- Part 1 — I Have Everything: The Origin Story
- Part 2 — Eleven Was Just the Beginning ← you are here
- Part 3 — I Am Who I Am: The Artist Era
- Part 4 — Rebel Heart: The Empire Builds
📍 First: “Eleven” Finishes What It Started (Early 2022)
IVE’s debut song “Eleven” had launched in December 2021 — but it kept winning through early 2022.
By the time “Eleven” was done collecting trophies, it had accumulated 13 music show wins — an extraordinary number for any debut song. The song became a cultural marker: the IVE dance challenge spread across TikTok globally, and the phrase “eleven” temporarily became shorthand in Korean fan communities for “a perfect debut.”
During the 2022 year-end and early-2023 awards season, IVE won rookie awards at several major Korean music ceremonies:
| Ceremony | Award |
|---|---|
| Melon Music Awards | New Artist of the Year |
| MAMA Awards | Best New Female Artist |
| Golden Disc Awards | Rookie Artist of the Year |
| Hanteo Music Awards | New Artist of the Year |
| Asia Artist Awards | New Artist of the Year |
| Genie Music Awards | New Artist of the Year |
IVE won rookie awards at several of Korea’s largest music ceremonies. For a group that had debuted just weeks before the end of 2021, this was remarkable. But rookies sweep rookie awards. What came next was the part that nobody saw coming.
🌊 “Love Dive” — The Song That Rewrote the Year (April 5, 2022)
“Love Dive” stayed at #1 on Korea’s year-end chart for all of 2022 — released in April, it defined the entire year.
On April 5, 2022, IVE released their second single album, Love Dive.
The single album debuted at #1 on the Circle Album Chart, while its title track went on to top the Circle Digital Chart — IVE’s first Korean chart-topper on that ranking. It held the #1 spot on the Digital Chart for four weeks and remained in the upper reaches of Korean and global K-pop charts for months afterward.
At the end of 2022, when Circle published its annual charts, “Love Dive” ranked #1 for the entire year on the Digital, Streaming, and Global K-pop rankings — the best-performing single in South Korea across all of 2022.
The Secret Origin of “Love Dive”
There’s a detail that became famous: Sunmi was offered “Love Dive” first.
In a later radio interview, veteran idol Sunmi revealed that she had been given the song before IVE and turned it down — feeling it would be “too cliché” for her style, and that a girl group would suit it better. She praised IVE for how they delivered it.
That origin story said something important: “Love Dive” was a song waiting for the right group. IVE was that group.
The Daesang Sweep
“Love Dive” didn’t just top the charts. It won top song honors at four major Korean award ceremonies at the end of 2022:
| Ceremony | Award |
|---|---|
| 🏆 Melon Music Awards | Best Song of the Year (Daesang) |
| 🏆 MAMA Awards | Song of the Year (Daesang) |
| 🏆 Golden Disc Awards | Digital Song of the Year (Daesang) |
| 🏆 Asia Artist Awards | Song of the Year (Daesang) |
Four Daesangs. With a song released during the group’s first year. From a group that had existed for less than 12 months.
Reaching the Daesang just 360 days after their debut made IVE the third-fastest girl group in K-pop history to win a first grand prize, behind aespa’s 380-day record set the year before.
In Korean music industry terms, this was not a milestone. It was a statement.
What Made “Love Dive” Work
The song operates on a deceptively simple idea: falling in love as an act of diving — the suspended moment before impact, simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. The choreography mirrors this: fluid, controlled, with moments of deliberate suspension that match the song’s emotional logic.
The chorus was immediately earwormy in a way that spread faster through social media than almost anything else released that year. The “dive” hand motion became one of K-pop’s most recreated challenge dances.
But underneath the pop accessibility, the song had craft. The production resisted the biggest, loudest choices at every turn — choosing restraint where other tracks would have pushed. That restraint is what made it last.
▶ Watch IVE ‘Love Dive’ MV on YouTube
⚡ “After Like” — The Third Consecutive #1 (August 22, 2022)
Four months after “Love Dive,” IVE came back.
“After Like” sampled Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” — a bold creative decision that could easily have felt gimmicky. Instead, it felt earned. The disco DNA gave “After Like” an immediate warmth and familiarity that made it accessible without being predictable.
The album debuted at #1 on the Circle Album Chart, and the title track went on to reach #1 on the Circle Digital Chart as well — IVE’s third straight chart-topper.
“After Like” also collected 14 music show wins — the most of any IVE single at the time, and one of the most-awarded songs of 2022 across all Korean artists — bringing IVE’s 2022 total to 37 music show wins across three singles (13 for “Eleven,” 10 for “Love Dive,” 14 for “After Like”). In K-pop, music show wins are the week-by-week currency of chart performance. That kind of haul in one year, across three songs, with no filler — that’s not a good year. That’s a historic one.
“Love Dive” ranked #1 and “After Like” placed within the top three on Circle’s 2022 year-end Digital Chart — making IVE one of the only girl groups to place two songs simultaneously near the top of the year-end rankings.
▶ Watch IVE ‘After Like’ MV on YouTube
🎧 Editor’s Top Pick — “After Like”
A personal note from the Editor.
I first heard “After Like” completely by accident — it came up in a playlist I wasn’t paying close attention to.
Then I was paying very close attention.
What got me wasn’t any single element. It was the combination. The melody keeps shifting — it doesn’t settle into one groove and stay there, it keeps giving you something new every eight bars, layering in textures that reward repeated listening. Underneath that, the members’ voices blend in a way that feels genuinely musical rather than just technically precise — you can hear individual character in each vocal line, and somehow it all coheres into something bigger than the sum of its parts. And then there’s the choreography: sharp angles softened by the disco warmth of the production, six people moving as one organism that still somehow reads as six completely different personalities.
Melody. Voice. Dance. All three working at full capacity, all three in the same four minutes.
I ended up on repeat for days. Not “one more time before moving on” — actual days, finding something new on each listen, genuinely not getting tired of it.
And then I noticed An Yujin.
She had been in my peripheral vision throughout — she’s hard to miss, frequently praised by fans as one of the most instinctively expressive performers in the group. But watching “After Like” stage footage closely, I kept coming back to her. The way she performs isn’t just technically correct — it’s inhabited. She’s in the song, not just executing it. There’s a directness to her stage presence that makes you feel like she’s performing specifically for you, which is the rarest quality any performer can have.
After “After Like,” I went deep into the Yujin rabbit hole. Stage footage, interviews, variety show clips. She held up in every format. The wit in interviews. The warmth in fan interactions. The complete transformation into a different mode of focus the moment the performance starts.
If you’re new to IVE and looking for a place to start — this song, this performance, this member. You’ll understand the rest from there.
▶ Watch IVE ‘After Like’ Stage Performance on YouTube
🎧 Editor’s Top Pick — “I Am”
Another personal note from the Editor.
If “After Like” was the song that pulled me in, “I Am” is the one that made me stay.
I know — “I Am” is technically a 2023 release, from IVE’s first studio album. But I discovered it in the same late-night listening session that started with “After Like,” and in my head the two songs live together as a pair. Two sides of the same IVE: one that makes you move, one that makes you feel.
What “I Am” does differently is take that same IVE confidence — I have everything, I know who I am — and makes it feel earned rather than announced. The production is more restrained than “After Like.” There’s space in it. The melody doesn’t chase you — it waits for you to come to it. And when the chorus opens up, the payoff is enormous precisely because the song took its time getting there.
Lyrically it’s simple on the surface: I am the hero of my own story. I decide who I become. But the way the members deliver it — especially in live performance — it doesn’t feel like a slogan. It feels like something they actually believe. There’s a sincerity in the vocal performance that the production supports rather than overwhelms.
I’ve watched the “I Am” studio performance video more times than I’ll admit here. The choreography has a kind of controlled stillness that contrasts with the energy underneath the music — moments where six people simply stand in formation and own the frame before exploding into movement again. It’s sophisticated staging for a group in their second year.
These two songs — “After Like” and “I Am” — are my personal recommendation if you’re deciding whether IVE is worth your time.
Start with “After Like.” Let it run for a few days. Then move to “I Am.”
By the end of that week, you’ll understand why IVE is different.
▶ Watch IVE ‘I Am’ MV on YouTube
▶ Watch IVE ‘I Am’ Studio Performance on YouTube
📊 The 2022 Numbers: What the Year Looked Like
| Song | Release | Circle Peak | Music Show Wins | Year-End Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eleven | Dec 2021 | #2 | 13 | Top 50 |
| Love Dive | Apr 2022 | #1 | 10 | 🥇 #1 |
| After Like | Aug 2022 | #1 | 14 | Top 3 |
Three releases spanning December 2021 to August 2022. Two #1s and one #2. One song of the year. Four Daesangs.
In K-pop history, only a handful of groups have matched this pace. IVE did it in year one.
🏆 Year-End Awards: The Full Picture
The 2022 year-end ceremony season was IVE’s formal coronation. Beyond the four Song of the Year Daesangs for “Love Dive,” they also took:
- Best Female Group — Melon Music Awards
- New Artist of the Year — Melon Music Awards (alongside NewJeans)
- Best Dance Performance Female Group — MAMA Awards (BLACKPINK won Best Female Group that year)
- Top 10 Artists — Melon, Circle, Genie, and multiple charts
- Circle Chart Music Awards — monthly digital-music honors for “Eleven” (December), “Love Dive” (April), and “After Like” (August)
The success of their debut led IVE to win Rookie of the Year awards at the 7th Asia Artist Awards, 2022 Genie Music Awards, 37th Golden Disc Awards, and the 2022 Melon Music Awards and MAMA Awards.
They won rookie awards and grand prizes in the same awards season. That combination — achieved by only a handful of groups in K-pop history — was the headline of their debut year.
🌍 DIVE: The Fandom Takes Shape
(The following is interpretive analysis based on visible trends, not a formal fandom study.)
Throughout 2022, DIVE was growing quickly. A few patterns stood out:
① Cross-generational reach. IVE’s music appeared to appeal to listeners across a wide age range. The confidence of the concept, combined with the accessibility of the melodies, seemed to give them unusually broad reach.
② Southeast Asian traction. Rei’s Japanese background and the group’s overall global positioning appeared to help build early traction in Japan and parts of Southeast Asia.
③ Streaming organization. DIVE developed a reputation among fans for organized streaming efforts that helped push IVE’s songs up daily charts following release.
④ Wonyoung’s individual visibility. Wonyoung’s presence as a music-show MC, brand ambassador, and fashion figure likely helped drive some listeners toward IVE’s music, though the extent of that crossover effect is difficult to measure precisely.
💡 Why 2022 Was So Important
It would have been enough to be a great rookie group in 2022. IVE wasn’t content with that.
What made 2022 historically significant for IVE was that they didn’t peak at debut and then settle. Each release in 2022 was bigger than the last:
- “Eleven” proved they could debut cleanly and win immediately.
- “Love Dive” proved they could sustain and define a year.
- “After Like” proved they could follow a phenomenon with another phenomenon.
That upward trajectory — each release escalating, not just maintaining — is the rarest quality in K-pop. It’s what separates groups that have a good debut year from groups that build empires.
By December 2022, IVE had done something almost no group in the 4th generation had managed: they had made everyone else ask “what are they going to do next?” instead of “can they keep it going?”
That question had a very good answer.
🇰🇷 What a “Daesang” Actually Means
This post uses the word “Daesang” a lot, and it’s worth being precise about what it means, because English coverage sometimes flattens it down to just “big award.”
대상 (Daesang) literally means “grand prize.” At Korean year-end music ceremonies, every ceremony hands out dozens of category awards throughout the night — best this, favorite that — but the Daesang categories (usually Song of the Year and Album/Artist of the Year) sit in a completely different tier. They’re typically announced last, often as the ceremony’s closing moment, and winning one is treated by the Korean music industry as a career-defining marker, not just one trophy among many. A group can win ten smaller awards in a year and still be described in Korean coverage as having “not won a Daesang yet” — the distinction matters that much.
That’s why IVE reaching a Daesang 360 days after debut is framed above as a statement rather than just an achievement: it’s the difference between being a well-liked rookie act and being formally recognized, by the industry’s own highest internal measure, as one of the year’s defining artists.
🔗 Continue the Story
- 👉 Part 1 — I Have Everything: The Origin Story — How six members found their way to Starship
- 👉 Part 3 — I Am Who I Am: The Artist Era — First studio album, world tour, Lollapalooza
- 👉 Part 4 — Rebel Heart: The Empire Builds — Daesang sweeps, Tokyo Dome, and 2026