Project groups were supposed to disband. In the Mnet project-group lineage that runs from Wanna One through IZ*ONE and X1, the expiration date had always been written into the contract from debut day, and not one of them had survived their own clock with the group IP intact. ZEROBASEONE was no exception. From the moment they debuted in July 2023, they had two years and six months — that was the time the nine members were given.
And yet, in May 2026, five members who walked past that expiration date are returning with their sixth mini-album, 〈Ascend-〉. Their debut EP 〈YOUTH IN THE SHADE〉(July 2023) moved 1,822,028 copies in its first week — the first K-pop debut EP ever to clear 1.8 million — and every studio and mini-release that followed has been a million-seller, making ZEROBASEONE the first 5th-generation boy group to cross 9 million cumulative domestic units. Their first full-length album 〈NEVER SAY NEVER〉(September 2025) entered the Billboard 200 at No. 23, and Billboard and Billboard Korea named the same record one of the “25 Best K-Pop Albums of 2025.”
Every assumption the industry held about project groups had to be rewritten to fit this group’s exit moment. The nine members that the global vote on 〈Boys Planet〉 produced did not merely outlive their expiration date — they used the time before it arrived to prove exactly who they were. And that proof continues, under the same name, in the five-member era. What follows is a ZEROBASEONE review that traces the musical identity nine members built and the new chapter five members are starting, along three axes: vocal cohesion, the 5th-generation default sound, and emotion-led concept-making.
The Vocal Cohesion That “Casting” Built
In Idology’s 2023 Rookies of the Year roundup, critic Cho Eun-jae placed ZEROBASEONE on the seven-act shortlist and wrote that “the single greatest strength of a group selected through an audition program is, without question, its casting.” A lineup that combined a fresh youthfulness with onstage maturity was built to be flexible across K-pop’s many genre experiments, and that balance became the asset most frequently tested — and most frequently confirmed — after debut.
Where that balance arrived most dramatically was in their collaboration with former SM Entertainment songwriter Kenzie. Starting with ‘Good So Bad’ from 〈CINEMA PARADISE〉(August 2024), continuing through the title track ‘Blue’ on 〈BLUE PARADISE〉(February 2025), and extending into the ‘Iconik’ line on 〈NEVER SAY NEVER〉(September 2025), the Kenzie partnership lifted ZB1’s musical identity up a tier. Reviewing ‘Blue’, the English-language outlet The Bias List wrote: “The vocal blend here is so SHINee-coded, as if it could have sprung from one of their 2018-era albums.” A signature SM vocal blend, in other words, adopted into an outside group’s own sound.
Park Gunwook, speaking with Grammy.com (September 2025) about the Kenzie sessions, said: “Our songs are not easy to sing, and we’ve been continuously building our ability in terms of expressing our music.” In the same interview, Seok Matthew added: “Working with Kenzie was an honor for us. We all have our different styles of singing, but she was able to bring them together so there was no cut in the flow. When you listen to the music, it sounds very, very smooth.” Stitching nine distinct vocal colors into a continuous line, those quotes reveal, was the core craft of the ZB1 sound.
The current five-member lineup preserves the spine of that vocal cohesion. Main vocalist Kim Taerae; the steady mid-range of Park Gunwook, Sung Hanbin, and Seok Matthew; and Kim Jiwoong, an actor by training whose tone sits apart from the rest. The roster has been cut almost in half, but the skeleton of the vocal balance has not been shaken.
Lightness and Freshness — The 5th-Generation Default Sound, Most Precisely Reproduced
In Idology’s “Year-End 2023” critics’ roundtable, the critic Squeep summarized what 2023’s debut boy groups had in common: “The most striking thing this year was the surge of new boy groups. ZEROBASEONE from Mnet’s 〈Boys Planet〉, BOYNEXTDOOR with Zico producing, RIIZE from the SM 3.0 era. All of them arrived not with sharpened intensity but with lightness and freshness.”
ZEROBASEONE is the group that learned that lightness and freshness fastest and reproduced it most precisely. Their debut song ‘In Bloom’ — sampling the main riff of a-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ (1984) over a drum&bass and synth-pop base — visualized the racing pulse of youth, and the discography that followed organizes itself cleanly into three clusters. The Youth Trilogy (YOUTH IN THE SHADE → MELTING POINT → YOU HAD ME AT HELLO) traced the beginning, the melting, and the encounter of youth; the PARADISE Duology (CINEMA PARADISE → BLUE PARADISE) advanced the thesis that “paradise is inside us”; and the first full-length 〈NEVER SAY NEVER〉 settled the accounts on both series.
At the debut press conference, Sung Hanbin put it this way: “Our album holds our thoughts about youth. Youth is beautiful, but there are trials inside that beauty, and it is those trials that make youth shine even brighter.” The first public statement from a fixed-term project group was a proposition about the duality of youth, and over the following two and a half years that proposition was returned to the world as the series arc of the discography itself.
Commercial performance was the trailing indicator of that musical consistency. After the debut EP’s 1.8 million+ opening week, the group strung together six consecutive million-sellers; their Japanese debut single ‘Yura Yura -Unmei no Hana-‘(March 2024) sold 302,315 copies in its first week, the first non-Japanese act ever to clear 300,000 in opening-week sales for a debut single. The group’s global coordinates show in their Spotify Top Streaming Cities — Singapore · Kuala Lumpur · Taipei · Tokyo · Bangkok — a listenership distributed evenly across Southeast and East Asia.
Emotion-Led Concept-Making — A World Built Without Heavy Lore
ZEROBASEONE’s concept-making consciously keeps its distance from the multiverse and supernatural lore of the 4th-generation boy groups. Rather than the heavy narrative architectures of TXT’s Sugar Rush Ride universe or PLAVE’s virtual multiverse, ZB1 chose a lighter, emotion-led approach built around “feeling motifs” — youth, the melting heart, paradise. It was a strategic choice: a low barrier to entry was what made the wider global entry possible.
Lightness, however, did not mean visual monotony. The music video for ‘Good So Bad’ — the title track from 〈CINEMA PARADISE〉(August 2024) — cast the actor Yoo Ji-tae as a novelist, with the ZB1 members appearing as characters inside the film he is writing, a metafictional construction. The cover illustration for the pre-release ‘Doctor! Doctor!'(January 2025) was drawn personally by Junji Ito, the master of Japanese horror manga. NME flagged the moment specifically as “a pre-release featuring an illustration by legendary manga artist Junji Ito.” Inside a vessel of light concepts, a visual spectrum that drew on cinema, manga, and VR unfolded.
The metaphor inside the group’s name is itself the spine of the concept. According to the official definition from their agency WAKEONE, ZEROBASEONE means “Starting from ZERO, being born as ONE: the gorgeous beginning of the nine members.” A ‘becoming’ narrative that goes from incompleteness (0) to completion (1) — self-referential at its core. By absorbing the constraint of being fixed-term into an aesthetic motif, the naming gave a single, consistent axis of meaning to the group’s activity as a whole.
From Nine to Five, and Into 〈Ascend-〉
On February 12, 2026, WAKEONE made its official announcement of the five-member configuration. The statement included this sentence: “Under the name ZEROBASEONE, the musical legacy the nine members have built together will not stay at a single point in time; it will continue its vitality as it expands in diverse ways and possibilities.” The four members signed to Yuehua Entertainment — Zhang Hao, Ricky, Kim Gyuvin, and Han Yujin — returned to their parent agency, and will debut as a new five-piece, AND2BLE, on May 26. Eight days after ZEROBASEONE’s 〈Ascend-〉 comeback.
Two groups born of the same source, releasing records in the same month, is a configuration almost without precedent in K-pop history. And yet the ZEROSE fandom has chosen to support both groups at once. It is an agreement — that the bond formed during the 〈Boys Planet〉 era reaches past corporate boundaries, and an endorsement of a new model where the legacy nine members built is carried forward by two groups, each in their own way.
The concept for 〈Ascend-〉, titled ‘A-Film,’ visualizes the five-member reorganization as a metaphor made literal. Sight (Sung Hanbin) · Touch (Kim Jiwoong) · Hearing (Seok Matthew) · Taste (Kim Taerae) · Smell (Park Gunwook) — five senses that had been scattered are slowly converging into a single space, in the structure of the trailer film. On the hyphen in the album title, Korea Herald summarized: “The hyphen in the album title ‘Ascend-‘ symbolizes continuity and forward momentum.” A visualization of progress, not of an ending.
Park Gunwook is reportedly credited as lyricist, composer, and arranger on ‘Customize,’ a track on the new mini-album. It is the first time, since debut, that a member has written their own music for an official ZB1 release. The assumption that a fixed-term project group has no time even to make its own music has been broken — directly, and after the expiration date. The seven titles on the announced tracklist — ‘Intro.’ · ‘Top 5’ · ‘V For Vision’ · ‘Customize’ · ‘Exotic’ · ‘Changes’ · ‘Zero To Hundred’ — also point explicitly to the five-member configuration and its intent. The record is released in 11 versions plus premium LP editions, and a music video will be unveiled before the audio drops — an unusual order of operations for K-pop.
The critic Han Sujin wrote, in ize: “What is most disappointing is that ZEROBASEONE has only just begun to bloom. Beyond the early-debut anticipation, the team’s color and musical world had become distinct; each member’s individuality and performance maturity had visibly hardened. And it is precisely at that moment — when growth potential is confirmed and the horizon stretches on — that the end has arrived.” But 〈Ascend-〉 shows that that end has been turned into another beginning. The roster has gone from nine to five, but the naming that took them from zero to one is, once more, valid. That a fixed-term project group can continue to exist under its own name past its expiration date — that fact itself becomes the first precedent the K-pop industry owes to ZEROBASEONE.
Collecting ZEROBASEONE Albums & Merch from Overseas?
〈Ascend-〉 releases in 11 versions and a premium LP edition. ZEROSE’s zeroni character goods and the photocard-collecting culture around each member generate a fresh trading flow every comeback.
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