Heize has always written about heartbreak with a kind of soft precision, but her new project feels different. LOVE VIRUS Pt.1 doesn’t try to tidy emotions up or present love as something that moves neatly from beginning to end. Instead, she leans into the idea that every goodbye carries its own shape – and sometimes several shapes at once. The more she talks about this album, the clearer it becomes that she wasn’t trying to chase a single storyline. She was trying to capture the way a breakup actually feels: scattered, repetitive, blurred around the edges, shifting form long after the moment has passed.

Those fragments became the backbone of Pt.1. She describes breakups as something that pull you through denial, resentment, anger, longing, and eventual acceptance, even though you’re technically saying goodbye to the same person. It’s those emotional micro-shifts that interested her most. The version of a breakup you feel at 2 a.m. is not the one that hits you two weeks later. The meaning changes, the memory changes, and sometimes the whole thing becomes unrecognisable. That sense of distortion ended up shaping the entire project.

The “glitch” aesthetic of the virus theme didn’t come first – the emotions did. But once her team suggested it as a visual frame, everything locked into place. It made sense to portray heartbreak as corrupted data, as something that jumps, skips, or repeats the way your mind does when you’re trying to make sense of the pieces still stuck to you. The idea of emotional errors, cracked memories, and late-night confusion was already there in the writing. The concept just made that structure visible.

There’s also a quiet contradiction running through the album: the impulse to love again, even after being hurt. She talks about this with surprising simplicity. You get wounded, then at some point you start wanting warmth again. You want to lean on someone again. That contradiction is uncomfortable, but it’s real, and she lets it sit at the centre of the project without sandpapering it down. LOVE VIRUS Pt.1 is the sound of someone acknowledging both sides of that feeling at once.

Her collaborations amplify that emotional range. MONSTA X member I.M’s contribution to the title track creates a push-and-pull between two very different energies – her wavering emotional tone meeting his colder, sharper delivery. With LEECHANGSUB, the warmth in his voice hides a bitterness that fits the regretful narrative of Last Taxi. Both features expand the album’s emotional palette rather than existing as surface-level pairings.

Across the project, Heize is more reflective than she used to be. Earlier in her career she wrote emotions as they appeared. Now she looks underneath them, tracing where sadness begins and what it leaves behind. Pt.1 is built around that shift. It sits in denial and confusion, intentionally unresolved, because she’s holding the rest of the story for Pt.2 – the stage where acceptance settles in and a new shape of love becomes possible.

LOVE VIRUS Pt.1 makes one thing clear: even the most painful moments eventually change you, and often for the better. For Heize, that’s where the growth is. Not in escaping heartbreak, but in learning what it reveals about who you become next.