In the autumn of 2016, when FNC Entertainment introduced its first dance group, the industry barely blinked. This was the label behind FTISLAND and CNBLUE — a band house — and nine dancing rookies did not fit that resume. SF9 had earned their debut slot on Mnet’s survival show d.o.b (Dance or Band) by beating the band team, but debuting was not the same as being noticed. Their first music show win took about three years and three months to arrive.
Ten years on, that same stretch of time reads differently. This SF9 review traces what the group chose along the way.
- Spotify monthly listeners: 248,660 (as of August 2026)
- Most-streamed track: “O Sole Mio,” released the year after their debut — 25.28 million plays
- 2025 headlining tour LOVE DAWN — 24 cities across 6 countries
- August 26, 2026: second studio album TENACITY, released for their tenth anniversary
How a group that started slowly went on to fill a decade becomes clear once you look at what they kept choosing.
A Decade of Changing Genres
The most striking thing about SF9’s discography is that they never settled into one color. Their debut single “Fanfare” was a brass-forward performance track, but “O Sole Mio,” released the following year in 2017, was Latin pop — not a common choice in the K-pop scene at the time.
The direction kept moving after that. “Now or Never” (2018) leaned into deep house textures, “Good Guy” (2020) into heavy bass and minimal arrangement, and “Tear Drop” (2021) into dreamlike synths and falsetto.
What makes this interesting is how those experiments have aged. As of August 2026, these are the five most-streamed SF9 tracks on Spotify.
Table 1. SF9’s most-streamed tracks on Spotify (as of August 2026)
| Rank | Track | Total plays |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | “O Sole Mio” | 25,283,902 |
| 2 | “Now or Never” | 22,809,618 |
| 3 | “Tear Drop” | 22,220,602 |
| 4 | “Good Guy” | 21,014,154 |
| 5 | “Summer Breeze” | 11,437,878 |
The top four songs sit in four different genres. And the number one is neither their biggest commercial hit nor their most recent release — it is the Latin pop experiment from the year after their debut. One reading is that the choice not to follow the trend of the moment is precisely what still carries this group the furthest, nine years later.
Changing colors from album to album does come at a cost, of course. It is harder to be remembered for one image, and every new release needs to be explained again. Stretch the timeline out, though, and the result flips. Songs that were never tied to a particular moment’s trend have aged more slowly than that moment did.
Member involvement in the writing has also grown. What started as rap-making early on widened into lyric and composition credits, and on TENACITY the credits include Youngbin, Hwiyoung and Chani.
Reversing the Verdict Onstage
Performance is a fixed item in any description of SF9, but that reputation was not handed to them.
In the first round of Mnet’s Kingdom: Legendary War in 2021, SF9 placed last among the six competing groups. Their score was 2,014 points, more than a two-fold gap behind the first-place team.
The other side of their acting careers is folded into that number. Having several members known from television helped the group’s visibility, but onstage it came back as a presumption: they act, so the dancing must be secondary. The very credential that earned them recognition worked against them when the judging started.
For the second round, they chose to turn the raw material of that presumption into the weapon itself. They pulled their acting experience into the staging, building a single song like a scene, letting expression and blocking carry a narrative. Their score rose to 3,349 points and landed them in the upper tier — closing the distance to groups like ATEEZ in a single round.
Their visual axis settled around the same period. The tailored suit concept established during “Good Guy” promotions in 2020 hardened into the image people picture when they hear the name, and “Tear Drop” varied it once more toward silhouette and line.
Ten Years Without Stopping
There is a two-year backstory to why that first win landed in January 2020. Several members were acting alongside their music, and a few of them became known faces before the group did. Chani drew attention as Hwang Woo-joo in the 2018 drama SKY Castle, and Rowoon took a lead role in Extraordinary You in 2019.
When individual work stands out in an idol group, the usual worry is that the team blurs behind it. In SF9’s case, the attention circled back. Rowoon has said on several occasions that the interest Chani received turned into interest in SF9 — and at the end of that current sit their first studio album FIRST COLLECTION and their first win. The album has sold 117,785 copies to date.
The record sales climbed clearly from there.
Table 2. SF9 first-week album sales (Hanteo Chart)
| Album | Release | First-week sales |
|---|---|---|
| 9loryUS | 2020 | 72,272 |
| TURN OVER | 2021 | 143,898 |
| RUMINATION | 2021 | 168,531 |
| THE PIECE OF9 | 2023 | 179,666 |
Between 2020 and 2023, first-week sales more than doubled. By cumulative total, TURN OVER leads with 227,192 copies (Circle Chart), and the fact that the first-week leader and the cumulative leader are two different albums suggests consumption here is not concentrated only in release week.
The period was not a smooth one. In September 2023 Rowoon left the group to focus on acting, and SF9 became an eight-member group. As members entered military service in sequence, the number active on any given release changed as well. Long stretches passed without the full lineup onstage.
Even so, their range widened rather than narrowed. The 2025 tour LOVE DAWN opened in Helsinki on October 8 and closed in Los Angeles on December 7, covering 24 cities in 6 countries along the way — 7 cities in Europe and 17 in the United States.
Given how few groups reach a tenth year at all, this trajectory can be read alongside long-running acts like BIGBANG. What differs in SF9’s case is that the thing holding up those years was not an explosive early success but albums and shows that accumulated steadily.
Their fandom name has been there for nearly all of it. FANTASY, chosen by fan vote in January 2017, has stayed the same name since the year after their debut.
Putting Persistence on the Cover
At 6 p.m. on August 26, 2026, SF9 release their second studio album TENACITY — six years and seven months after FIRST COLLECTION.
That gap does not mean the years were empty. Several mini albums arrived in between, and most recently, in March 2026, the special album About Love filled every track with a ballad. What was left open was not activity but the studio album format, and that space is now being filled to mark ten years.
The title is built to be read twice. TENACITY means persistence, determination, an unyielding will — and the TEN at its head points to the tenth anniversary. It reads less like a name chosen first than one arrived at after deciding what a decade should be called.
The title track is “Without Wings.” Where a title about flying again without wings is headed, according to the label, is a story about moving past one’s limits. The album holds ten tracks including the title, and members contributed lyrics to several of them.
October 5 marks exactly ten years since their debut, and a tenth-anniversary solo concert, Chukmong, is scheduled in Seoul that month.
Looking back, the thing this group has done best was never arriving at the top quickly. They waited three years and three months for a number one, climbed back up from last place, and kept releasing albums while the people who remained covered for the ones who had gone. That the name they chose for their tenth year is persistence does not, in that light, look like a coincidence.