Hyein just turned 15, but her birthday wish is unusually purposeful for a teenager: “I want to show more of my skills and different sides of me that I haven’t shown yet,” she says. This youthful drive to keep growing is a common denominator among Hyein and her NewJeans bandmates: Minji, Haerin, Hanni, and Danielle, who are all under 20. A year ago, no one knew who NewJeans was. But since it dropped its first music video in August 2022, the nascent K-pop girl group—managed by the record label ADOR, a subsidiary of the South Korean entertainment behemoth HYBE, which launched boy band BTS to international acclaim—has already reached global milestones even faster than its more senior counterparts in the industry. Two of NewJeans’ singles stayed on the Billboard 100 for five weeks this year, and in March the band became the fastest Korean act ever to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify in just 219 days, despite having released only a handful of songs. This August, NewJeans will become the first K-pop girl group to perform at Lollapalooza. Read more about NewJeans : https://ti.me/45m1XN7 Subscribe to TIME’s YouTube channel ►► http://ti.me/subscribe-time Subscribe to TIME: https://ti.me/43lqM9Y Get the day’s top headlines to your inbox, curated by TIME editors: http://ti.me/the-brief Follow us: Twitter: https://ti.me/3MzEO1k Facebook: https://ti.me/3OxT1Oz Instagram: https://ti.me/3OyBCWb
