The Look of Virtual K-Pop on Soft Static, Which Past Mirea Built in the Open
The Look of Virtual K-Pop on Soft Static, Which Past Mirea Built in the Open
An Independent Label Writes the K-Pop Origin Story, Then Publishes How It Was Generated
Past Mirea keep a biography on their website headed Bio-ISH, and the suffix matters. It tells a classic K-pop origin story about four queer Korean-American women from San Francisco, then admits that this is only how things could have gone. Soft Static, out since 1 October 2026, comes from that same openly built world: a virtual K-pop girl group whose faces, voices and songs come from AI tools under human direction.
Past Mirea’s Soft Static sits in the playlist below with our queer pop, pop ballad and synth-led pop picks. Past Mirea’s artist profile collects the group’s coverage. Soft Static reached AltPop.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Listen to the single, then keep reading for where this virtual K-pop group fits.
Virtual K-Pop Idols Came From Big Companies Before Past Mirea Brought Soft Static Out of San Francisco
K-pop has been building idols who do not exist for at least five years. Most of them came out of company labs. In March 2021, the AI firm Pulse9 launched IITERNITI, then called Eternity, with the single I’m Real. Pulse9 made its eleven members with its own AI technology, Deep Real.
Two years later, the game company Netmarble arrived through its subsidiary Metaverse Entertainment. Their group, MAVE:, released the single album Pandora’s Box on 25 January 2023. Kakao Entertainment backed the project and distributed the music. The four members are hyper-realistic CGI figures, built with machine learning, deepfake and 3D production tools. Even so, MAVE: relies on human performers for the singing and the choreography, and the company has never named them.
SM Entertainment took the longest road. Its virtual artist nævis began as a research project in 2017 and first appeared in 2020, as a character in the story world of aespa. SM built the voice of nævis with AI, blending samples from several voice actors. Her solo single Done arrived in September 2024.
Each of them came from a large company, and each led with the character rather than the workshop. Past Mirea lead with the workshop instead.
AltPop.News Curator Team: “We placed Soft Static in our playlist because its quiet verses and full chorus work on first play, before you know anything about how it was made. The questions come afterwards, which is exactly the test the label set.”
Where Past Mirea Fit, as Soft Static Puts a Queer Love Song Inside a Project That Shows Its Working
Past Mirea come from Mirea Music, an independent label in San Francisco. The group’s website keeps a page on the creative process, and it reads like a set of production notes. It lists what the AI tools produced: the words and song structures, the voices, the music and the four members’ likenesses. It also lists what people did, from writing the prompts to arranging the voices and instruments.
The label treats the whole project as a social experiment. It asks whether fandom can grow around performers with no bodies at all. Candour about the tools is one of the variables.
Spotify’s credits then put names on the human side of Soft Static. They name Rynelle Alara Chen as writer and composer. They also name Rynelle Alara as producer, and as the engineer who recorded, mixed and mastered the single.
Personas, a Name and the Palette Past Mirea Built Around Soft Static
The presentation fills in the rest. On the Bio-ISH page, each persona gets a vocal colour of its own, from a rough-edged low register to a big belt. The group’s name carries a design brief, too. Mirea, the label explains, means future, and pairing it with Past describes the method: older sounds carried into new pop. The mini-album Forward Pivots Along takes that literally, naming South Korean trot, 1980s rock textures, Latin-inspired rhythms, brass and strings among its ingredients.
Soft Static is the quietest way into that palette. The song stays in one room and one moment, two lovers in bed, and it builds its hook from what touch sounds like. It opens on a hushed instruction, Shh… just feel this, and the verses stay almost under the breath. The production borrows from ASMR, folding close-up foley into the arrangement over breathy pads, snaps and arpeggiated synth lines. Then the chorus lifts onto the dance floor, and the build shows: a K-pop dance-pop frame with R&B and moombahton influences running through it.
The Acts Around Past Mirea, From Holland to the Virtual Idols Built by Labs
On the queer side of the map, Holland is the reference point. In 2018, no entertainment company would work with an openly gay artist, so he paid for his debut single, Neverland, with two part-time jobs. Its video, in which he kisses a man, received a 19+ rating in South Korea. His stage name honours the Netherlands, the first country to legalise same-sex marriage.
Past Mirea reach the same gap from another direction. The label says queer, all-female representation is still rare in K-pop, so it wrote four queer women into the centre of a virtual group. Its songs treat queer love as ordinary pop material, down to the bedroom scene of Soft Static.
So who is this for? Fans who follow MAVE: and nævis for the world-building will find the same pleasures here, with the scaffolding left in view. Listeners who came to K-pop through Holland will find queer love at the centre of the song. Play Soft Static first, then read the Bio-ISH page again.
Stream Soft Static on Spotify, and hear Past Mirea on Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Follow the group on Spotify, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, or find every link on Linktree.
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