Ten years into her career, CIFIKA has made the record she'd been circling since debut. Old Fantasy, her new EP, is the first project she's produced entirely alone – no outside collaborators shaping the sound, no co-writers softening the edges. She calls it, in her own words, "thirty people singing through one person."

That description isn't hyperbole. CIFIKA has spent a decade stacking her own voice into choirs of one, a technique she's carried since singing in a children's choir at six. But Old Fantasy strips away the collaborators who once helped build her expansive electronic-pop worlds, and asks a more uncomfortable question: what does her music sound like when nobody else is in the room? The answer runs across seven tracks that move from political unrest to childhood memory to the unravelling of a relationship she still hasn't fully made sense of.

The EP's opener, "Who," was written in the winter of 2024, in the days after South Korea's martial law declaration, when CIFIKA was living close enough to the former president's residence to hear the protests from her window. From there, the record pivots hard into memory. "Mine" reaches back to a childhood crush and a sandpit she nicknamed after a desert; "Passing a Gossip" picks apart a friendship that curdled; "Lullaby" hovers between comfort and nightmare. The focus track, "HEX," takes its name from a ruby's hex code and turns heartbreak into something closer to a scar you point with rather than hide. "All because of" and closer "Belong 2 U" carry the record out through silence, regret, and eventual acceptance.

This isn't new territory for CIFIKA in terms of ambition. She's toured 20 US cities in a single run, had Romy of The xx personally ask to rework a single, scored a Louis Vuitton show featuring BTS, and picked up two Korean Music Awards. But Old Fantasy is the first time the scale is entirely internal. There's no outside perspective left to hide behind.

Below, CIFIKA walks us through Old Fantasy track by track, in her own words.

This was the first song I drew out for the EP. I started working on it in winter and finished it in spring, and for a long time it sat at the very end of the tracklist – until I realised the record made more sense if it began here. It opens with nothing but my own voices stacked on top of each other, which felt like the right way in.

I wrote the words in December 2024, right after martial law was declared in Korea. I was living in Hannam-dong then, close to the former president's residence, so the protests went on outside my window all night. Some nights I went out to join them; other nights I just lay in bed and listened. It genuinely sounded like hell. And out of that I wanted to write a revolutionary song – something like "Bella Ciao" from the Money Heist soundtrack, which I love. The title used to be "Who let the fire". I cut it down to "Who". I like simple titles.

When I was six there was a Chinese restaurant in my neighbourhood called Seorabeol, and the youngest son of that family, Seong-wook, was my first love. We met every day in the sandpit playground of our apartment complex – tricycles, popsicles, the swings. We told each other we should get married, with no idea how enormous a thing we were saying.

On the swings we'd pass each other and his voice would come closer and drift away, which is exactly what a phaser does, so I put a real phaser on the vocal. "You're mine, mine" is something he used to say to me all the time, so I sang it trying to sound like a child – like a very small, very pure promise that was somehow also forever. And I named our sandpit Rio de Oro, because I wanted to give a playground the name of the most desolate and most beautiful desert there is.

I've never told this story out loud before. I don't know where he is now and I've never tried to find him. I wish there were a way to get the song to him.

I used to love gossiping with my close friends. There was no bad intention in it – it was fun, and sharing someone else's story made me feel bound to the person sitting across from me. Sharing things only between us. I thought gossip was the fastest way to get close to someone. It turns out it's the fastest way to crack something open.

For the little sounds that answer each other underneath – the sound of two friends egging each other on – I used samples called "cocktail", the sound of ice knocking against a glass. And the arpeggiated synth bass doesn’t end from start to finish. It was deliberate: it's the loop of a habit you can see clearly and still can't break.

I wrote these lyrics almost two years ago. Listening now I feel nothing at all, which I took as proof I'd moved on – though talking about it like this is bringing it back. I suppose the song is my closure on that friendship.

I started this wanting to make a lullaby I could fall asleep to, so I recorded myself humming. That humming is still the first thing you hear on the finished track. But as I was recording the bass synth, it completely took over the song. It swallowed everything.

I'd been trying to make something like Burial, but it didn’t go my way, and it turned into a nightmare instead. So I chose to walk in that direction: toward the stillness that only exists when you wake at dawn out of a bad dream, when you've just come back from somewhere else but can't say where.

The lyrics are real sentences I wrote, recorded and then chopped up, so almost nothing is intelligible – especially wherever that i9 sound is. I love that. It's my voice but pitched down until it sounds like a man's. And at the very end it comes back to being a quiet lullaby again. That's why I kept the title. Calling it "Nightmare" would have been no fun.

I like looking up the names and colours of gemstones – partly because it's very funny to me that all of these things trading for enormous money are, in the end, rocks. Beautiful, but rocks. One day I found out that the finest grade of ruby is called pigeon blood, and that rubies have an asterism effect: when light hits them, six white lines open out like a star. Adobe has an official colour called Ruby, and its code is HEX#E0115F.

The song starts from that image. The love I had when I was young was mostly pain and conflict, and the scar it left is set into the ruby as those six lines. I wear it on my index finger – not the finger you put a wedding ring on, the finger you point and accuse with.

I don't own the ring. Real pigeon blood ruby is far beyond what I could afford. But the colour is in the music video, and I'll be wearing HEX#E0115F painted on my finger throughout this era.

The last line – "Now I look back in time it's just extraordinary thing” came after the song was finished. I felt the outro needed something, and I wrote down exactly how I feel now.

The title stops in the middle of a sentence, and that's the point: this is a song about a state that never resolves. It's about the things you never manage to say aloud.

You have the option to tell the truth or stay silent, and even though you have every chance to speak, you choose silence.

What I still find interesting is the question underneath it; if I had chosen the truth, would the relationship have survived? I still don't know. There's a lot about truth I don't understand yet.

"We never talked about" repeats repeatedly. I sang it about thirty times in a single take, without stopping, and after a while it became intelligible. That's exactly what I wanted.

Regret comes back the same way – the same sentence echoing until it stops meaning anything and just mumbles.

The YouTube algorithm pushed Daechwita (genre of Korean traditional music consisting of military music played by wind and percussion instruments, generally performed while marching or as a static performance) in front of me.

My friend Songhee, who works in Korean traditional music, had told me about it, and it's also a BTS song title, so I started researching. I don't know anything about traditional Korean music, but the meaning of the word got me: to blow greatly, to strike greatly. I wanted to make something with that kind of scale. A march, but a march through a dream, walking on top of clouds.

"I belong to you" is normally a full love confession in English. I wanted to twist it completely by putting "because you are my past" straight after it. That relationship wasn't a healthy one, but it's still a part of me, and I can't pretend it never happened, so this song is me accepting it as mine. It felt like the right way to end the record.