YOUNG POSSE turned trainee homework into their own hip-hop
Photo: DSPMedia
Before YOUNG POSSE had a name, they had the monthly evaluation. Once a month the trainees staged a two-hour concert for the staff of DSP Media in Seoul, cueing their own lights and holding the microphone out to a crowd that was not there, leader Jung Sunhye told the music webzine IZM. That crowd turns up next Sunday. The group marked three years since its debut this weekend, and on 25 October it opens its first European tour at Scala in north London.
The distance between those two rooms is the story of five members who started rapping only after joining the company, as Wi Yeonjung told IZM. Their hip-hop was never an inheritance. It was homework, done side by side until it became theirs.
Three years after their debut, the five members of DSP Media's girl group write their own songs and direct their own videos. On 25 October they open their first European tour at Scala.
The practice room
They reached the practice room from different directions. Sunhye wanted a stage because of BTS: being a fan made her want to give someone else that feeling, she told Hypebeast Korea in May 2024. Before DSP, her dance covers on YouTube had passed 3m combined views.
Yeonjung was a shy child who had been signed up for a dance class to bring her out of herself. Jiana, now the main vocalist, began training at 14 on Girls' Generation, IU and Ariana Grande, and warns interviewers that her Busan accent creeps in when she talks for long.
Han Jieun, the youngest, had once been the leader among her fellow trainees. In YOUNG POSSE she found herself the one being looked after, as she told Hypebeast Korea.
Doeun came last. Cast at a composition academy, she debuted five months after arriving at DSP, and at first learned the group's songs and choreography alone from a tablet, Nocut News reported.
At her first monthly evaluation she watched the older members and Jieun pick hip-hop tracks and rap them, and for someone raised on K-pop alone it was a shock. Jiana described the same jolt, and falling for it on the spot.
The evaluations were where the group found its voice. Sunhye once wrote a song about her frustration with type beats and performed it there, freestyle-style at a standing microphone, addressed to the company's own staff. Yeonjung said it was finished in a day and the chief executive liked it.
DSP Media, the label behind Fin.K.L. and KARA, debuted the five on 18 October 2023 with the EP Macaroni Cheese, co-produced with the independent Beats Entertainment. The launch ran on supermarket flyers, receipts and food boxes, and billed them as the K-pop scene's "contrary frog", Sports Kyunghyang reported, after the folk-tale frog that always does the opposite.
The food was not only marketing. The title track began with the members messing about together, and eating keeps turning up in their lyrics because, Yeonjung told IZM, they have a strange hunger where food is concerned.
They did things their own way from the start. After their first music-show recording the members asked for handheld microphones so they could sing live, Yeonjung said; miming, Sunhye added, left them with awkward expressions on screen. The "XXL" video passed 30m views within a month of its March 2024 release, Hypebeast Korea reported.
Small moments made it real. For Jieun it was sitting down with the first letters from fans after the showcase. For Sunhye it was a K-Wave festival in New Zealand, when for the first time she stood in front of more people than cameras. Festivals, she later told IZM, suit the group better than music shows.
One another
What holds the five together shows most when they talk about one another. Asked which talents she envies, Jiana named one per member: Yeonjung's sharp dance lines, Doeun's height, Sunhye's rap and Jieun's range of expressions on stage. Doeun compared Jieun to Geodude, the small and tireless rock Pokémon.
They learned to write by talking. Outsiders heard "Scars" as a cute song; the members heard a sad one, and arguing it out among themselves was how they began writing lyrics, Sunhye told IZM. Once, at an evaluation, they tried a sweet, innocent concept and could not bear to watch one another do it, Doeun said.
Sunhye's own summary is that weaknesses, shown together on stage, turn into the group's particular strength. Doeun's proudest moments, she told the Korea Times in August 2025, are when the five catch each other's eyes mid-performance.
That August they released Growing Pain Pt.1: Free, their most personal record. Jieun said she wrote about the fear of moving from trainee to singer, and about chasing what she wants anyway. "School's Out" tells the story of Sunhye and Doeun leaving school for music, Korea Times reported. The title track, "Freestyle", lurches between punk, jazz and metal. Jiana said it had "the energy of a mischievous little frog", two years after their debut campaign had named them one.
They headlined abroad before they did at home. The Hungry Tour took them to a dozen American cities in autumn 2024, according to DSP Media, and closed with fan concerts in Seoul. Their first full Seoul concert came a year later, at Myunghwa Live Hall on 29 November 2025, Newsis reported, noting that a solo show in Japan had just sold out.
In January Sunhye entered Mnet's Show Me the Money 12 and, on her third attempt, won a pass chain from the producer Zico.
Finished homework
The homework is now finished. In July the group released young tape, a 12-track mixtape on which the members wrote and composed every song, Topstar News reported. At debut, each had written only the lyrics for her own part. The opener, "Mr 2026", samples "Mr." by KARA, the label's best-known act, according to Sports Kyunghyang. Yeonjung directed the video for "ADHD" in Seoul, while Doeun directed the one for "Mr 2026" in Tokyo.
Their newest single, "GO해", released on 7 October, reaches further back, to a vintage 90s hip-hop sound.
They still want the classic prizes, a long chart run and a first music-show win, and have named Coachella and Lollapalooza as the stages they are aiming for, the Korea Times reported. Europe is the next stop on the way.
The tour takes its name from "Pilot3", a January single. After London it continues to Paris on 28 October, Barcelona on 29 October, Berlin on 1 November and Kraków on 3 November.
Asked in 2024 what she hoped for, Yeonjung said she wanted their songs still playing in the street long from now. "A tidy clothes shop would do too," she said.
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YOUNG POSSE turned three this week with a self-written mixtape and a first European tour opening at Scala, London, on 25 October.