It’s been a long road for NewJeans, from the halcyon days of their chart-topping Get Up EP, to a yearslong legal dispute tied to allegations of workplace mistreatment and copyright infringement, to a failed attempt to rebrand as NJZ. The K-pop group officially announced a hiatus in 2025, and there has been little news since then—until today (July 21), when their label, HYBE imprint ADOR, released a series of short videos featuring the group’s four remaining members, Hyein, Haerin, Hanni, and Minji. (A fifth member, Danielle, acrimoniously parted ways with ADOR late last year.) ADOR introduced the clips’ “commemorative content” to mark the fourth anniversary of NewJeans’ debut, adding, “We plan to announce NewJeans’ specific activity plans and methods after discussions are completely finalized.” It’s still unclear what, exactly, that new activity will look like, but in the meantime, it’s worth revisiting the thorny history behind one of the most successful K-pop acts of the 2020s.
The Debut
NewJeans officially launched in 2022 as a five-piece, made up of singers Hyein, Haerin, Minji, Hanni, and Danielle. They emerged under the supervision and support of mentor and lead producer Min-Hee Jin, a former SME Entertainment creative director who helped shape Girls Generation, Exo, Red Velvet, and more. (Min became ADOR’s CEO in 2021.) NewJeans’ first three songs—“Attention,” “Hype Boy,” and “Cookie”—found immediate success, with “Hype Boy” becoming the longest-running song on the Billboard Global 200 by a K-pop girl group in history. All three tracks appeared on their eponymous debut EP, which landed in August 2022.
The (Even Bigger) Hits
By 2023, NewJeans had established themselves beyond the Korean market. The Get Up EP, which featured the hits “Super Shy” (co-written by Erika de Casier) and “ETA,” topped the Billboard 200. That same year, they became the first K-pop girl group to perform at Lollapalooza, a set that also marked their live debut in the States. They later broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest K-pop group to reach one billion streams on Spotify.
The Label Drama
There seemed to be no ceiling for NewJeans’ meteoric rise. That changed in 2024, when HYBE launched an audit of Min over allegedly trying to take ADOR independent (Min, in turn, publicly accused HYBE of, among other things, copying NewJeans’ style and choreography when it launched another group, ILLIT). The dispute eventually resulted in Min’s removal as ADOR’s CEO, a shake-up NewJeans’ members publicly disavowed. In a surprise YouTube livestream, all five artists expressed discontent with HYBE’s management, and brought up labor concerns including alleged workplace harassment and the label’s leaking of proprietary personal information. They ended the video by urging HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk to reinstate Min by September 25, 2024.
“Like how we have our own and individual thoughts and feelings, we have the choice to choose how we will react to each situation and we are not going to follow HYBE’s every order blindly,” Hanni said in the video. “We are more than well aware that this is getting in the way of our work and that we should be treated much much better than how we are right now.” Despite their efforts, Min resigned from HYBE.
The Name Change and the Hiatus
In February 2025, NewJeans gave an exclusive interview to CNN where they revealed a new name: NJZ. The approach was intended to serve as a loophole in their exclusive contract with ADOR; however, a South Korean court ruled that the group had not managed to prove “significant negligence” by the label, and barred them from signing individual contracts. During a live performance at ComplexCon Hong Kong in March, the group declared that they were going on hiatus, with the members noting, “It wasn’t an easy decision, but we believe this is something we need to do at this moment.” Later that year, a separate South Korean court ruled that the group must honor their seven-year contract with ADOR, which is set to expire in 2029.
