In June 2025, when THEBLACKLABEL introduced ALLDAY PROJECT, a five-member mixed-gender group, the conversation around the team was already a step ahead of the music. The Korea Herald described them as “the first new mixed-gender K-pop act in eight years,” noting that “Kard, launched by DSP Media in 2017, is the only other active coed idol group.” On top of that, even before debut, the members’ backgrounds drew attention before their songs did. People were talking about who this team was before they talked about what it would sing.
Fifteen months later, the first answer came from the numbers. Their debut song “FAMOUS” reached No. 1 on the Melon TOP 100 on June 26, 2025, four days into its release, and on July 3, just ten days after debut, the group took its first music show win on M Countdown. On the Billboard Global 200, the song entered at No. 94 and climbed to No. 43 the following week. The debut single sold 48,468 copies in its first week on the Hanteo Chart; half a year later, their first EP, ALLDAY PROJECT, sold 250,071 copies in its first week, about five times as many. At the award ceremonies held from November 2025 to January 2026, they received MAMA’s Breakthrough Artist award and Rookie of the Year honors at AAA, the Melon Music Awards and the Golden Disc Awards. As of September 2026, “FAMOUS” has passed 93.68 million streams on Spotify. The Melon No. 1 was the public’s answer, the trophy ten days after debut came from the viewers and fans who were watching, and the fivefold first-week sales came from a fandom that gathered within six months.
Numbers, however, don’t tell us what this team answered the attention with. This ALLDAY PROJECT review looks for that answer in the songs. Over fifteen months, their music moved from lyrics that never directly responded to the attention to lyrics that quote the criticism and answer it, and the hands writing those lyrics gradually became the members’ own.
1. Lyrics That Began Quoting Their Critics and Answering Them
Their debut song was titled “FAMOUS.” In a track that sings about every gaze following them, there is a line that goes, “But we ain’t even famous.” Saying they aren’t even famous yet reads as a way of stepping aside rather than facing head-on the attention that had gathered before debut. It acknowledges that the gaze is there, while quietly drawing a line: that attention did not come from anything they had done.
Nine months later, the words were different. In March 2026, in “I DON’T BARGAIN,” a collaboration released for the ninth anniversary of PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Annie wrote into her own rap part, “Diamond spoon stir up the pot,” followed by “They say I paid makin’ me really wanna / Now I gotta pave the way they’ll never walk on.” The first line brings out, in her own words, what the gaze had been pointing at. The next two say that people claiming she paid her way only drives her further, and that she will build a path those people will never walk. Instead of stepping aside, she carried the words of the criticism straight into the lyrics and attached her own answer to them.
It wasn’t only the words that changed. So did the people writing them. On the debut single’s two title tracks, “FAMOUS” and “WICKED,” members were credited as lyricists, but not a single member appeared in the composition credits. On the first EP half a year later, Tarzzan and Bailey wrote both the lyrics and the music for the pre-release track “ONE MORE TIME.” Tarzzan was credited as a composer on “LOOK AT ME” and the unit track “HOT,” and Woochan on the unit track “WHERE YOU AT.” The lyrics of “I DON’T BARGAIN” weren’t Annie’s alone, either; Tarzzan, Bailey and Woochan wrote them with her.
A team that had been on the receiving end of the gaze became a team that talks about it, and it increasingly wrote those words with its own hands. Where this change came from becomes clear once you look at where the five came from.
2. Five Who Never Tried to Be the Same
The five members of ALLDAY PROJECT started out in different fields. Bailey is a choreographer from the American dance crew Kinjaz who, as a teenager, worked on the choreography for aespa’s “Savage” and “Spicy.” Tarzzan majored in contemporary dance at the Korea National University of Arts and won a gold prize at the Dong-A Dance Competition before enrolling. Woochan is a rapper who appeared on Show Me the Money 6 in 2017 at the age of twelve. Youngseo finished second on the audition program R U Next? and was chosen for another group’s debut lineup, but did not debut with that group. Annie became a member of this team while continuing her studies at Columbia University in the United States.
Bailey described the fact that the five didn’t learn the same way in the same practice room not as a weakness but as the character of the team. In an interview with Hypebeast Korea, Bailey said, “I think the beauty of ALLDAY PROJECT is that we don’t try to be the same. We’re learning how to move as one while keeping our own individuality.” In another part of the interview, Bailey put it this way: “Creatively, culturally, even personally, we all come from completely different worlds.”
Because the team wasn’t built around one person’s way of doing things, a single line written on everyone’s behalf could hardly serve as an answer for all five when they faced that attention. Once people who had spoken through dance, through rap and through song became one team, each had to be able to speak in their own language first for those words to become the team’s words.
3. Winning Over the Team First, from Within
So how do five people with their own languages make a single song? Woochan explained the process in an interview with W Korea: “I persuade the team with what comes from inside me, and then the team persuades the public.” The sentence lays out exactly the order in which this team works. First, one person brings out something from within; only after it has convinced the team does it go out to the public. “WHERE YOU AT,” which Woochan co-composed, is a unit track he sings with Annie, and the two also wrote its lyrics together.
Tarzzan, who holds the most composition credits among the members, didn’t hide the other side of the same process. “Since we write and compose our own music, things can sometimes lean more toward what we want,” Tarzzan told Hypebeast. “But the company helps us find that sweet spot.” What comes from within doesn’t always reach the public as it is; the label strikes a balance in between. Even within that balance, Tarzzan is credited as a co-composer on “ONE MORE TIME,” “LOOK AT ME” and “HOT.”
The same approach shows up on stage. Speaking about the mixed-gender format, Bailey said the team tries to mix perspectives, energy and emotions to create something richer and more dimensional, rather than dividing parts between men and women. When their dance videos were released at debut, alongside point choreography that brings the lyrics forward, the pair choreography that makes the most of a mixed-gender group drew attention. One dance channel introduced the “WICKED” performance video with the description “the textbook of pair choreography.” Rather than setting up separate parts for the male and female members, they built the stage around moves that are only complete when two people pair up.
In Annie’s case, her words and her lyrics sit side by side. Speaking about joining the legacy of THEBLACKLABEL and producer TEDDY, Annie said, “Rather than pressure, I was genuinely thrilled to become part of the legacy of THEBLACKLABEL and our producer, TEDDY. Instead of letting expectations weigh me down, I’ve used them as motivation.” Turning expectations that could have weighed her down into motivation reads in tandem with the lyrics, seven months later, that answered the criticism.
The words of these four members come together into one. First you convince the team with what comes from within, and then the team puts it in front of the public. Underneath this team’s ability to answer criticism in its songs lies this order, in which the answer comes from the members themselves.
4. The Goal Set After Fame
In a team whose debut song was titled “FAMOUS,” Youngseo described success like this: “I don’t think simply ‘becoming famous’ is the only kind of success. When I actually reach the goal I want to achieve, the goal I truly want, I think that’s worth more.”
For this team, fame wasn’t something they achieved; it was a condition given to them from the start. They were talked about before they debuted, and their backgrounds were discussed before their songs. You can’t make a goal out of something you already have. So the goal had to be set beyond it: not becoming famous, but deciding for themselves what they want and getting there.
Seen this way, the “But we ain’t even famous” of their debut song reads differently too. It can be read as a first sign that they would not count the fame handed to them as their own achievement, and that they would set a goal of their own. The fifteen months in which lyrics that never responded became lyrics that answer criticism, written by the members themselves, are the distance this team has walked from the starting line of fame toward a goal of its own.
5. Where the Five Meet Again
On September 28, 2026, at 6 p.m. KST, ALLDAY PROJECT released its second EP, CRASH. It came about nine months after the first EP, and it is the first album the five have made together since Annie returned after finishing her studies. At her Columbia University graduation in May, streamed live, Annie stepped onto the stage and left a message calling out to the fandom by name: “I love you, DAY ONE.”
CRASH holds five tracks: “TALK,” the title track “CRASH,” “DO IT LIKE THIS,” “NO 한도” (NO LIMIT) and “UP ALL NIGHT.” Introducing the album, THEBLACKLABEL wrote that “ALLDAY PROJECT grows by constantly facing the world’s gaze directed at them.” The label itself put the thread this review has followed into the words it chose to describe the album. The title track “CRASH” is an electro song in which the melody rides a repeating low-register synth loop before switching, at the hook, to a dance beat driven by a drumline; the label says it carries “a bold attitude that refuses to be bound by fixed rules.”
The album opens with “TALK,” released first on September 21. The label introduced this industrial hip-hop track as one that “answers head-on the many gazes surrounding ALLDAY PROJECT.” The gaze their debut song never responded to directly was answered through one member’s lyrics in “I DON’T BARGAIN,” and this time an entire opening track became that answer. Of “NO 한도,” built on Brazilian funk, the label wrote that “the confident cry they have kept up since debut continues unchanged.” “DO IT LIKE THIS,” whose music video came out early on September 24, puts the five’s own vibe and confidence forward over minimal bass hip-hop.
The hands writing the lyrics kept moving toward the members on this album as well. Members are credited as lyricists on all five tracks, and Tarzzan and Bailey co-wrote the lyrics for every one of them. “NO 한도” and “UP ALL NIGHT” credit all five members as lyricists. On the composition side, Tarzzan is credited on “DO IT LIKE THIS.”
The album’s final track, “UP ALL NIGHT,” is the group’s first attempt at an acoustic sound. The label described it as carrying “the wish to enjoy the present moment together for a long time, even amid uncertain and repetitive days.” It is an album that opens with a song answering the gaze and closes with a song whose lyrics all five wrote together. The five who once stepped aside with “But we ain’t even famous” now write their own answers to that gaze and place them at the beginning and the end of an album. Where those words will point next is what to watch.