Photo: Courtesy of EDEN Entertainment
ALL(H)OURS, a seven-member group from a small Seoul agency that has spent three years ignoring K-pop's turn towards gentle, easy-listening pop, will play their first London show at Heaven, off Villiers Street, on Thursday 12 November.
The bet has been paying in increments. Their fifth mini album, NO DOUBT, sold 21,115 copies on its first day in March and passed 100,000 within five days, both career highs. Its title track also won Inkigayo's Hot Stage, which is decided entirely by fan vote.
Those figures matter because of what ALL(H)OURS were supposed to be making instead. In an industry survey published on 2 November, Joynews24 asked 142 people working in entertainment to name the year's most influential figure. Their top pick was RESCENE, a small-agency girl group credited with winning through easy-listening pop anyone can enjoy.
ALL(H)OURS has sold more with every album since 2024 while making the music small agencies are told to avoid. On Thursday they play London for the first time.
That is the template for an underfunded act: soft, short, built for a 30-second clip. ALL(H)OURS have released a growl hook (READY 2 RUMBLE), a track fusing witch house, dark trap and rock (DEAD MAN WALKING) and, in September, one splicing EDM with metalcore (DANG DANG).
The members have said plainly that they were not sure it would work. "Music built on hard listening is closer to non-mainstream than mainstream," they told Joynews24 in April. "There were moments we doubted whether we could keep doing such intense concepts."
Kunho, the leader, told the same interview that EDEN Entertainment is every member's first agency, and that as a small company it was hard to get attention from the start. The group, he said, was beginning to break through that.
The agency is small, but its lineage is not. EDEN was founded by Cho Hae-sung, a founding member and former vice-president of JYP Entertainment who oversaw management of 2PM, TWICE, Stray Kids and ITZY. Moreover, in May 2024, JYP bought 7,812 redeemable convertible preference shares in EDEN for ₩3.1bn (about £1.7m).
That backing came with pressure. At the group's debut showcase in January 2024, Xayden said he knew from signing that Cho had been a JYP vice-president, and worried whether they could meet standards raised by those groups. J.Y. Park sent a video message saying he had watched them since before the lineup was final.
Cho did not build the group from trainees seasoned elsewhere. He went looking for new faces, which is part of why the members describe the sound as something they found together rather than inherited.
They have committed to it physically. For NO DOUBT, Xayden said, he took a radical haircut and facial piercings, and the team hired a tattooist to draw tattoos so they would look like devils, according to the Joynews24 interview.
The argument is not that loud music outsells soft music. It is that a small act can choose its lane and still grow every time, which is rarer. The members put it the same way: slow, but certain, as the Joynews24 headline quoted them.
Europe has been part of that climb. Their 2025 fan concert tour ran to eight cities from Warsaw to Lisbon and skipped the UK. Opening this year's run in Warsaw and Oberhausen last week, they played to bigger crowds than in 2025.
Those rooms have heard a set that turns on its final song. In Warsaw and Oberhausen the group greeted each crowd in the local language, then closed not on DANG DANG but on My Spring, My Light, My Breath, the one ballad in their catalogue, written by all seven members for their fans. It is the quiet counterweight to everything loud before it, and the fans are in it literally. Its music video is cut from footage they filmed on their own phones at last year's fan concerts.
London was the city last year's tour left out, and this time it gets the only UK date. Heaven holds about 1,200, according to the show's DICE listing, close enough for a growl hook to land in the chest.
ALL(H)OURS play Heaven, under the arches off Villiers Street, on Thursday 12 November, with doors at 5.15pm and general admission from £59; tickets are on here.
Translations from Korean are Zutter's own.
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ALL(H)OURS, the group who chose metalcore over easy listening, grew sales with every album. They play London's Heaven on 12 November.