IVE's LIZ Drops 'Tunnel' and Fans Are Already Wrecked

IVE's LIZ has released "Tunnel," the first OST for tvN's new Saturday-Sunday drama Spooky in Love (오싹한 연애), and the ballad lands exactly as hard as the drama's title promises. The track went live on July 19, 2026, and for fans of LIZ, of IVE, and of K-drama music that genuinely earns its emotional weight, the reaction has been immediate and overwhelming.

"Tunnel" is a ballad about the particular kind of darkness that feels endless — the anxiety and loneliness of being in a situation with no visible exit — and about the impulse, despite everything, to move toward whatever faint light remains. It is not a comfortable song. It is not supposed to be. LIZ brings her characteristic clear, high-register vocals to material that demands both technical precision and emotional honesty, and she delivers both.

This is LIZ's fifth OST contribution, and it may be her most carefully matched to her abilities yet. For a singer known equally for her crystalline upper register and the delicate quality of her falsetto, a song that exists in the space between hope and grief is close to ideal territory.

What "Tunnel" Actually Sounds Like

The track was written by 이아람 and AllThou, composed by AllThou, Suhyun Kim, and 이아람, and arranged by AllThou and Suhyun Kim. The production is spare by design: piano, strings, bass, guitar, and careful synthesizer textures — all in service of giving LIZ's voice as much room as possible to carry the song's emotional argument. Drums enter strategically rather than as a constant backdrop, and the string arrangement builds in the way ballads should: slowly enough that you feel the accumulation before you realize it's happening.

Lyrically, "Tunnel" navigates the gap between despair and persistence. The title is not incidental: a tunnel is a place of total darkness with a theoretical end you cannot yet see. The song sits in that in-between space — acknowledging the overwhelming reality and deep sorrow while refusing to let go of the small hope you cannot easily abandon. It is a song for characters who have not given up, but who also cannot quite see why.

LIZ's vocal performance works specifically because she does not oversell the emotion. The temptation in a ballad of this type is to push toward catharsis too early — to let the voice swell before the song has earned it. LIZ resists that. She inhabits the uncertainty of the lyric rather than resolving it prematurely, and the result is a track that feels genuinely inhabited rather than simply performed.

The Drama "Tunnel" Was Written For

Spooky in Love (오싹한 연애) is a remake of the popular Korean film of the same name, reimagined for tvN as a weekend series. The premise is an occult romance: Cheon Yeo-ri (Park Eun-bin / 박은빈), a chaebol heiress who has been able to see ghosts since childhood, crosses paths with Ma Kang-uk (Yang Se-jong / 양세종), a passionate and relentlessly high-energy prosecutor who turns out to be more afraid of ghosts than anyone she has ever met. The drama is directed by Lee Min-su (이민수), written by Choi Jeong-mi (최정미), and produced by CJ ENM.

The pairing of Park Eun-bin and Yang Se-jong alone would have been enough to generate substantial anticipation. Both are established leading figures in Korean television, and this is their first shared project — a fact that makes Spooky in Love a notable event for Korean drama viewers independent of its supernatural premise.

The drama's ghost-seeing conceit gives its OST a specific brief: music that can carry both the comedy of a ghost-phobic prosecutor and the genuine emotional stakes of a romance developing under unusual circumstances. "Tunnel" is positioned as the emotional anchor — the track that establishes the series' more serious register before any of the occult situation-comedy arrives. A drama's first OST release frames the emotional tone of everything that follows, and LIZ's casting as the opening voice is a statement about the kind of drama Spooky in Love intends to be.

LIZ as an OST Performer — A Five-Track Case Study

This is not the first time LIZ has been called upon to lend her voice to a Korean production. "Tunnel" is her fifth OST contribution, a number that places her among the most consistently active idol-to-OST performers in her generation. The specific quality that makes her a recurring choice is worth articulating: LIZ's voice has a purity of tone that translates cleanly across production styles, from the ethereal pop of IVE's group material to the more traditionally structured harmonic world of Korean drama ballads.

Within IVE's own discography, LIZ has consistently been the member whose vocal contributions define the group's upper emotional register. Her solo track "Unreal (언리얼)" on IVE's second full album REVIVE+, released in February 2026, gave listeners the clearest sustained look at what LIZ sounds like as the primary focus. The reception confirmed what the group's broader catalogue had already suggested: a singer who had matured alongside her group, building a genuine solo musical identity in parallel.

"Tunnel" extends that trajectory into ballad territory. If "Unreal" demonstrated LIZ's capacity for introspective contemporary pop, "Tunnel" shows what she does with more classical Korean ballad structures — the spare instrumentation, the strategic use of silence, the emotional stakes that accumulate verse by verse rather than arriving all at once. Together, the two tracks build a case for LIZ as a versatile solo voice that will keep being called upon for exactly this kind of work.

IVE's World Tour and What LIZ's OST Signals

The release of "Tunnel" coincides with one of the most expansive stretches of IVE's group career. The six-member act recently concluded a Japan leg of their second world tour, "SHOW WHAT I AM," that drew approximately 127,000 attendees across Kyocera Dome in April and Tokyo Dome in June. Those two venues represent a significant milestone for any Korean act performing in Japan, and IVE's shows were covered prominently across Japanese sports media.

The North America leg of the tour launched on July 21, with dates in Toronto, Montreal, Newark, Austin, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Vancouver scheduled across the remainder of the summer. LIZ is therefore simultaneously a group member in the middle of a major international tour and an individual artist whose OST work is circulating through a separate audience — drama viewers who may encounter "Tunnel" through the show before they know anything about IVE, and existing fans who follow LIZ's solo activities specifically.

That dual presence — group member and individual artist — is increasingly common among prominent idol group members, but LIZ's specific vocal profile makes the OST lane an unusually natural fit. The qualities that make her valuable to IVE — the precision of her high notes, the warmth she brings to more vulnerable moments, the ability to sustain emotional content over extended passages — translate directly into what a drama OST requires. "Tunnel" is not LIZ adapting her voice to a different context. It is LIZ's voice finding another context where it belongs.

"Tunnel" is available now on all major streaming platforms. The official music video is on the Stone Music Entertainment YouTube channel. Spooky in Love airs on tvN on Saturdays and Sundays.