Ebstar’s Maknaebe (Deluxe Version) arrived November 29, 2024, on the founder’s 23rd birthday. The twenty three track album spans house, deep house, Amapiano, electro pop, bass house, R&B and several adjacencies between them, with collaborations from VMHP, RATSBE, PieceMaker, Postythegod and SkyDAWN.

The title carries its own meaning. Maknae in Korean translates as “the youngest one,” a familial term used most often within Korean groups, families and crews. The phonetic addition turns the noun into something more like a name. The choice is not coincidental for a Zimbabwean producer who built his career in Seoul, navigating both as the youngest in the rooms he was working in and as the only one who looked, sounded or arrived the way he did. The album is, in that sense, a record about the texture of being the youngest one.

That self knowledge sits underneath what is otherwise a structurally ambitious album. Twenty three tracks across half a dozen genres is the kind of move that on paper reads as scattered. In practice the record is held together by a working sensibility that is consistent regardless of tempo or genre frame. Korean club rhythm informed by Southern African weight. Patience in the build. Vocal placement that prioritises conversational quality over performance gloss.

The deluxe edition includes thirteen new tracks layered into the original ten track release. The additions widen the range without diluting the centre. RATSBE, the Ebstar alias and former standalone persona that operates as a creative cousin within the label’s splits structure, appears on five new tracks. PieceMaker contributes “harvard sgija,” a sgija inflected Amapiano cut that bridges the album’s Korean pop tendencies with the label’s Southern African anchor. Postythegod brings the closing argument across two tracks. SkyDAWN turns up on “hard times don’t last,” a hip hop reflection that rhymes thematically with READY TO BE LOVED, the standalone single that followed in 2025.

Sequencing is one of the underrated decisions on the record. The album opens with “all i want is you (intro),” a piano and pad meditation that sets the emotional register before any drums arrive, and closes on “in my feelings (outro),” a short instrumental coda that releases the listener back into the room. The intervening twenty one tracks rotate through house, Amapiano, electro pop and bass house with a logic that makes more sense the second time through.

The standout tracks are not the most genre forward ones. “Moonlight Over Hollywood” is among the album’s best at the synth pop end. “COMING BACK FOR MORE,” released as a single in late September ahead of the deluxe edition, is a club ready cut that placed at number 100 on the South Korean Spotify chart. “Falling For Love,” featuring Postythegod, is the album’s most quietly emotional moment, a deep house construction that asks for the listener’s full attention and earns it.

The chart story is the more striking one. “sexual pt. I (ecstasy),” the album’s fifth track, peaked at number 9 in Estonia on release day, November 29, 2024. It is the highest single chart position any ESØTËRIC track has reached on a national chart, and the only top ten finish in the catalogue to date. The next day, “what does it mean to be happy?,” the album’s second track, peaked at number 1 on the Luxembourg Daily Spotify Chart and at number 37 on the weekly. The album’s second daily chart topper for the label in less than nine months. Three songs from one record, on three separate national charts, in three different countries.

The release sits in the middle of what has been a defining stretch for the label. Earlier in the year, ECHOES OF LOVE I (Deluxe Version) had taken the label to its first daily chart number one: “But....I DONT TRUST YOU” topped the Luxembourg Daily on March 15, 2024, and “The Breakup Anthem” later reached number 45 on the South Korea Weekly. The Forbes BLK profile arrived two weeks before Maknaebe. By the close of 2024, total catalogue streams had crossed five million. Maknaebe is the centre of that arc. It is the record where Ebstar makes the case for the label not as a collection of singles but as a coherent body of work.

Maknaebe (Deluxe Version) is streaming now on all major platforms.