I’d never truly woken in fright until the night I opened my eyes to find my 12-year-old at the foot of the bed, whispering in the inky darkness: “Can I tell you more facts about Stray Kids?”
The child had run out of hours in the day to discuss her favourite band. I already knew that Stray Kids are the only K-pop idols who write and produce their own songs. That the band — average age 25 — have had seven No 1 debuts and that Ryan Reynolds is such a fan he appeared in their Chk Chk Boom video.
I know that at the Met Gala last year Chris Hemsworth was so excited to meet them he lifted each of the eight members one by one but only Changbin — a wickedly fast rapper — was almost too heavy for him to manage. (I mentioned to my daughter that all boy bands have one member who is chunkier than the others. Her eyes narrowed as she hissed: “Changbin is not chunky, he is buff.”)
Alongside BTS, who are a generation older, Stray Kids are considered the inspiration for the Saja Boys, the demon boy band in KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s most-watched film to date. From film and TV (including Parasite’s 2020 best picture Oscar win and Squid Game’s stranglehold on the streaming market) to the deluge of K-beauty boutiques to the ubiquitous K-pop, South Korea has replaced America as the culture young people dream about.
Stray Kids formed in 2018, the end result of a Korean reality show contest. In August, their fourth album, Karma, debuted at No 1 on the US Billboard album charts and another one is expected next month. They have 20 million YouTube subscribers and 30 million TikTok followers. This summer they played two sold-out nights at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, gridlocking swathes of north London. The Dominate tour has made close to $200 million, second only this year to Beyoncé — although the band members still live together in dorms in Seoul. That South Korea has a particularly low birth rate (siblings are becoming more unusual) might be a subtext to why groups tend to be expansive and why they don’t mind spending all their time together.
You could say I have Stockholm syndrome (Seoul Succumbing?) but ten minutes into the Tottenham show, I was a “Stay” — in other words, a fan. I don’t understand Korean, but because it’s a syllable-timed language it is relaxing to listen to, like getting into a hot bath. The dance technique is insane, the personalities chaotic. If you were raised on Adam Ant and Duran Duran, unusually good-looking men in full make-up is a core memory — but their stage outfits take it further: Chanel-style tweed jackets with glittery brooches that your grandma wore when she took you to eat scones, only theirs are strained by their muscles, upending not just gender norms but generation gaps.
Emma Forrest’s daughter with a cardboard cutout of Felix of Stray Kids
The music, produced in-house by Bang Chan, Han and Changbin (aka 3Racha) is both hook-y and complex, their signature being a propulsive, foreboding sound. They are experimental: see the Baile-inflected instant classic Ceremony, or Thunderous, where they blend the Southern US “trap” genre of hip-hop with the traditional Korean janggu drum. If BTS are K-pop via the Jackson 5, Stray Kids are closer to K-pop strained through the Prodigy. Like the Prodigy (and Lady Gaga or Freddie Mercury) they balance the tightrope of absurdity.
The eight years of documentary footage Stray Kids broadcast on their YouTube channel feeds the devotion of the Stays. It’s updated almost every day with them doing diaries and skits — wake up and watch them opening their birthday cards or playing ping pong. It’s a lot less stressful than checking what Donald Trump did while you were asleep.
We live in dangerous times, and if someone were to hold up a gun and demand I name three Stray Kids pets, I could: Kkami the chihuahua, who sleeps with Hyunjin; Soonie, one of multiple rescue cats belonging to Lee Know; and Berry the King Charles spaniel, who lives with Bang Chan’s family in Australia, where he grew up.
Like his fellow member Felix, Bang Chan (birth name Christopher Bahng) was scouted there and brought to Seoul as a young teenager for the JYP label’s “trainee” programme: years of dance and singing practice before they were launched. He was appointed Stray Kids’ leader and was able to help make things right when, in the reality show’s elimination round, JYP let go of Felix, who is now (in their parlance) one of the most “biased” — or popular — members. Hiring two English speakers contributed to their crossover internationally. (Han, who was brought up in Malaysia, also speaks fluent English with a British accent.)
Hyunjin, Lee Know, Changbin, Seungmin and Bang Chan of Stray Kids on stage at the American Music Awards in 2024
MICHAEL BUCKNER/GETTY IMAGES
Stray Kids seem to be both vision boards and avatars for Stays. Their music videos speak to the way young women are simultaneously deranged by sexual longing and in mourning for their childhood — a clip for Thunderous has them dressed adorably as their “SKZOO” cartoon animal mascots, while the clip for Red Lights sees Bang Chan and Hyunjin writhing around each other in S&M rope binding to genuinely horny effect.
Women do not exist in the Stray Kids visual lexicon, so much so that when called to pose with a female celebrity at an awards show, they generally default to hands outstretched in wonder — a pose Stays have termed “Behold, a woman!” It feels subversive that, in the era of the incel — when young men terrified they’re being mocked by women might actually try to kill them — Stays show their love by relentlessly roasting the band online.
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However each member identifies — and in a magic trick we know absolutely everything and nothing about their lives — Stray Kids have fans who fantasise about being with them and others who project a Flowers in the Attic situation that encompasses both the band’s pale make-up (a Korean beauty standard) and the idea that, cooped up together in dorms, who would they have to explore love with but each other? They seem unbothered. In this week’s diary, Lee Know blithely described how he commands Han to present his bottom in the mornings for smacking. Han concurred, dutifully, that this is the case. If nothing else, they appear to have complementary neuroses.
Donatella Versace even fell under the spell, naming Hyunjin — a pretty extraordinary dancer — her muse. Perhaps influenced by the episode where he calmly applied lipstick while driving a bumper car, he is also the face of Givenchy cosmetics. It is some face, a heady brew of decades, ethnicities and gender: a little Toshiro Mifune, some Sade, a touch of James Dean. There’s footage of him sitting at a table opposite Stays at a meet and greet, staring into each person’s eyes so deeply he seems to be eating their soul, Saja Boy-style. I later realised he was replicating The Artist Is Present by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, for whom he has expressed great admiration.
Bang Chan is not only the group leader but also its father figure, forever trying to wrangle the others. He has the easy charm of a mechanic rolling out from under a car to say, “G’day mate!” The gentle Han is a fierce rapper and the warmest personality. Seungmin is the strongest singer, his solo cover of High and Dry by Radiohead quite beautiful. IN is the youngest (or the maknae), with dimples and “a happiness that is infectious”, Han once noted, to which Lee Know drily replied, “Like a virus,” causing Han to sigh: “What is wrong with you?”
Lee Know became my “bias” after he returned his hair to its natural colour because being blond upset one of his cats. With the haunted beauty of a porcelain doll, he is the K-idol version of a door in a horror film you know you mustn’t open, but find yourself inextricably drawn to. Beyond his excellent dancing, rosebud lips and propensity for spanking, his most celebrated characteristic is his frequent threat to cook Hyunjin in the air fryer.
Because the members contain such strong dichotomies, they’ve upturned the long-standing racist tradition of emasculating east Asian men by labelling them delicate. How do you emasculate Changbin, Korea’s loudest man, almost too muscular to be lifted by Thor? How do you put Felix in a box when he is so pretty he modelled in the Louis Vuitton womenswear show this year, but also has the deepest voice in the band — the deepest voice of any man I can think of in pop? I particularly appreciate the way Felix and Bang Chan explode the archetype of the domineering Australian male. What was once implicit for us with boy bands — that you will be safe practising your first sexual stirrings — is explicit now.
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The affection among the group feels authentic and JYP has just renewed the contracts of all eight members. While the rest of us wonder how we let friendships slide with age, these boys who grew up with each other have their bond protected (although each — apart from the Australians — will take turns to perform their mandatory military service). That looming service may be why they release new music at such a pace, their latest a mini-album called SKZ It Tape “Do It” which is out on November 21.
There is presumably a dark side to being constantly documented. It’s painful to watch the reality contest episode of Felix — so young, small for his age and far from his Australian family — expelled from the band for his failure to become proficient in Korean. He sobs as if for everything he’s held in during his whole life. The other members take turns holding him. It’s something more evolved than western identity politics: neither they nor their fans need ever be required to label themselves. I, a middle-aged woman in England, can purchase make-up because it looks great on a Korean man in his mid-twenties. Teenage boys can leave weight-lifting sessions free to hug each other, discuss their emotions and apply lipstick in bumper cars. Although I’d prefer not to be woken from my sleep to talk about them, I am grateful that this is the boy band of their generation.
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