Secret Secret Flavor — Twelve Years Later, Two Members and a New One
Secret debuted in 2009 under TS Entertainment with "I Want You Back" and built a run of second-generation K-pop hits - "Magic," "Madonna," "Shy Boy," "Poison" - before label disputes and member departures dismantled the group between 2016 and 2018. The four-member lineup never formally disbanded. It simply stopped. Jeon Hyosung and Jung Hana (Zinger) are the two who came back. Yebin, 23, a vocal competition show alumna whose Girls on Fire run ended in episode eight, is the third member of the trio that released Secret Flavor today under RBW.
The missing members matter here because Secret Flavor asks to be received as a Secret comeback without two of the four people who made Secret what it was. Song Jieun - the group's most distinctive solo presence, whose subsequent solo career included the widely appreciated "Don't Look at Me Like That" - is not here. Han Sunhwa, whose departure to pursue acting in 2016 began the unraveling, is not here either. RBW and the remaining members have not offered a public explanation for their absence. What's left is a partial reunion, and "ICE CREAM," the title track, largely avoids the weight of that context.
That's a defensible choice. "ICE CREAM" is a mid-tempo pop dance track that samples Vivaldi's "Spring" - the string figure running underneath the chorus, repurposed as a frame for a summer crush metaphor built around cold sweetness and melting. The production keeps the sample light enough that it reads as texture rather than quotation. The hook - "Ice cream like / deureowa deureowa deureowa / chagapge dalkomhae" - is immediate, clean, and built to support choreography. Hyosung's vocal sits where it always did: controlled, a little smoky on the lower register, strongest in the chorus. Zinger's delivery is sharper and more rhythmically assertive, the contrast that gave Secret's best tracks their dynamic range. Yebin carries the bridge with enough confidence that the skepticism about inserting a new member into a legacy group lineup mostly quiets by the end of the song.
The problem is that "ICE CREAM" is the strongest thing on Secret Flavor by a margin that exposes the EP's limitations. "GOOD DAY" reaches for the energy of the group's 2011-2012 peak and finds something adjacent to it - bright, bouncy, slightly chaotic in the production - but it doesn't have a hook that earns that ambition. "LOVE LANE" is a mid-tempo b-side that does what mid-tempo b-sides do: fills time between the tracks that have a reason to exist. "FALLING STAR" closes the EP with a ballad register that showcases Yebin's vocal range more clearly than anywhere else on the record, and it's the moment that most honestly acknowledges the emotional weight of a 12-year gap - without naming it directly, which is either graceful or evasive depending on what you wanted from this reunion.
The reunion trend powering Secret Flavor's existence - Baby V.O.X in 2024, I.O.I, SeeYa, and now Secret in 2026 - runs on the purchasing power of fans who were teenagers in the second-generation era and are now in their 30s and 40s. Secret Flavor is designed for exactly that audience: familiar enough to activate nostalgia, polished enough to not embarrass the catalog it's invoking. It succeeds on those terms. It doesn't try to be more than that, and the EP is honest about its own nature in a way that some reunion projects aren't.
What it can't quite resolve is the partial lineup. A reunion EP built around two of four members plus a new addition isn't a reunion - it's a continuation with revised personnel, and "ICE CREAM" is good enough to make that continuation worth having. Whether it's a Secret record in anything more than name is a question Secret Flavor declines to answer.
Secret Flavor is out now via RBW.
