It has been an extended highway for NewJeans, from the halcyon days of their chart-topping Get Up EP, to a yearslong authorized dispute tied to allegations of office mistreatment and copyright infringement, to a failed try to rebrand as NJZ. The Okay-pop group formally introduced a hiatus in 2025, and there was little information since then—till right this moment (July 21), when their label, HYBE imprint ADOR, launched a sequence of quick movies that includes the group’s 4 remaining members, Hyein, Haerin, Hanni, and Minji. (A fifth member, Danielle, acrimoniously parted methods late final yr.) ADOR launched the clips’ “commemorative content material” to mark the fourth anniversary of NewJeans’ debut, including, “We plan to announce NewJeans’ particular exercise plans and strategies after discussions are fully finalized.” It’s nonetheless unclear what, precisely, that new exercise will appear like, however within the meantime, it’s price revisiting the thorny historical past behind one of the crucial profitable Okay-pop acts of the 2020s.
The Debut
NewJeans formally launched in 2022 as a five-piece, made up of singers Hyein, Haerin, Minji, Hanni, and Danielle. They emerged below the supervision and assist of mentor and lead producer Min-Hee Jin, a former SME Leisure inventive director who helped form Women Era, Exo, Crimson Velvet, and extra. (Min turned ADOR’s CEO in 2021.) NewJeans’ first three songs—“Consideration,” “Hype Boy,” and “Cookie”—discovered speedy success, with “Hype Boy” turning into the longest-running tune on the Billboard World 200 by a Okay-pop woman group in historical past. All three tracks appeared on their eponymous debut EP, which landed in August 2022.
The (Even Greater) Hits
By 2023, NewJeans had established themselves past the Korean market. The Get Up EP, which featured the hits “Tremendous Shy” (co-written by the one and solely Erika de Casier) and “ETA,” topped the Billboard 200. That very same yr, they turned the primary Okay-pop woman group to carry out at Lollapalooza, a set that additionally marked their reside debut within the States. They later broke the Guinness World Document for the quickest Okay-pop group to achieve one billion streams on Spotify.
The Label Drama
There gave the impression to be no ceiling for NewJeans’ meteoric rise. That modified in 2024, when HYBE launched an audit of Min over allegedly making an attempt to take ADOR impartial (Min, in flip, publicly accused HYBE of, amongst different issues, copying NewJeans’ type and choreography when it launched one other group, ILLIT). The dispute finally resulted in Min’s removing as ADOR’s CEO, a shake-up NewJeans’ members publicly disavowed. In a shock YouTube livestream, all 5 artists expressed discontent with HYBE’s administration, and introduced up labor issues together with alleged office harassment and the label’s leaking of proprietary private data. They ended the video by urging HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk to reinstate Min by September 25, 2024.
“Like how now we have our personal and particular person ideas and emotions, now we have the selection to decide on how we are going to react to every state of affairs and we aren’t going to observe HYBE’s each order blindly,” Hanni mentioned within the video. “We’re greater than nicely conscious that that is getting in the way in which of our work and that we ought to be handled a lot significantly better than how we’re proper now.” Regardless of their efforts, Min resigned from HYBE.
The Title Change and the Hiatus
In February 2025, NewJeans gave an unique interview to CNN the place they revealed a brand new title: NJZ. The strategy was meant to function a loophole of their unique contract with ADOR; nonetheless, a South Korean courtroom dominated that the group had not managed to show “important negligence” by the label, and barred them from signing particular person contracts. Throughout a reside efficiency at ComplexCon Hong Kong in March, the group declared that they had been occurring hiatus, with the members noting, “It wasn’t a straightforward determination, however we consider that is one thing we have to do at this second.” Later that yr, a separate South Korean courtroom dominated that the group should honor their seven-year contract with ADOR, which is ready to run out in 2029.
