SOUTH KOREA
Stray Kids
PIONEERING A NEW SOUND When Stray Kids won the Best K-Pop award at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards in September, the South Korean boy band didn’t seem to believe it. Group leader Bang Chan pointed to himself and mouthed, “Us?” before walking up onstage alongside his bandmates HAN, Changbin, Hyunjin, Seungmin, I.N, Lee Know, and Felix.
While most K-pop groups are carefully constructed and rigorously trained in private before their debut, Stray Kids, who range in age from 22 to 26, had a more unconventional start: on a Korean reality-TV show, also called Stray Kids, in 2017. But it wasn’t a straight-ahead singing competition, as one might assume. Record label JYP Entertainment, the industry giant behind groups like 2PM and TWICE, had rounded up…