aespa celebrated their 1st debut anniversary: from a super rookie to a half-million seller
In celebration of aespa’s 1st debut anniversary, let’s take a look back at their journey for the past 1 year.
On November 17th last year, aespa appeared in the music industry with their debut single “Black Mamba“. In a year, they went from a rookie who received global attention for their unrivaled metaverse perspective to becoming a half-million seller.
aespa has become a representative girl group of the 4th generation with their extraordinary achievements and brilliant moves with each released song, from their debut song “Black Mamba” to “Next Level” and “Savage.”
Not only did their debut song “Black Mamba” enter four Billboard charts with only three days’ tally, but the music video also set a new record of the fastest debut song music video in the history of K-pop to reach 100 million views. “Next Level” is also the 1st girl group song to top the chart since the reorganization of the Melon 24Hits chart. It surpassed 100 million views on YouTube about 19 days earlier than “Black Mamba”, breaking aespa’s own record.
In particular, “Savage”, the title song of their first mini-album released on October 5th, has been at the top of major domestic and foreign music charts since its release and even ranked 20th on the Billboard main chart “Billboard 200”, the highest in K-pop girl group history.
The song once again confirmed aespa‘s global power by entering a total of 10 charts, including “Artist 100”, “World Album”, “Independent Album”, “Top Album Sales”, “Top Current Album Sales”, “Tastemaker Album”, “World Digital Song Sales”, “Billboard Global” (excluding the U.S.), and “Billboard Global 200”. The “Savage” music video also surpassed 100 million views within 17 days of its release, breaking aespa’s own shortest record again, proving their noticeable popularity.
In addition, their first mini-album “Savage” recorded 510,000 album sales in 15 days after its release, proving their “Half Million Seller” title. Aside from physical sales, the girls also show strong power in digital sales as both their songs “Next Level” and “Savage” were nominated for 1st place together on music shows, proving their popularity as a syndrome.
In response, Forbes, a leading U.S. economic magazine, got their attention on how “aespa set a sales record in the U.S. with their first album Savage,” while PEOPLE’s highly interested as they selected aespa as one of the “rising stars of Hollywood in 2021.”
aespa is a name created by combining ‘æ’, which is made up of ‘Avatar X Experience’, and the English word ‘aspect’. With a concept based on the worldview of “meeting another avatar of yourself and experiencing the new reality”, aespa has garnered much attention since their debut.
In particular, through this concept, various contents such as performance stage videos, in which aespa members dance alongside their avatars ‘ae’, and an SMCU video showing the narrative of aespa’s worldview have received a good response.
In addition to lyrics such as ‘aespa is me, there can’t be two’, terms related to aespa worldview such as ‘ae-00’, ‘KWANGYA’, ‘SYNK’, and ‘P.O.S’ also became popular online as a kind of meme. Signature choreographies such as the hand gesture in ‘Next Level‘ or ‘zzu-zzu-zzu-zzu’ dance in ‘Savage‘ also became viral challenges and gained global popularity.
aespa’s unique concept is to expand the ambitious vision of the real and virtual world, also called the Metaverse, to entertainment, and provide more diverse and new experiences targeting the digital native generation who are familiar with various digital contents in line with the non-face-to-face era in the future.
The ‘super rookie’ aespa, who have had a hectic year after their debut, is expected to keep up with their busy schedules by attending various year-end stages and awards ceremonies. On November 25th, they will be the first Kpop girl group to perform at ‘Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade’, the largest Thanksgiving festival in the U.S., held in New York.
As aespa signed a contract with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the largest agency in the U.S. back in July, the group is open to new opportunities abroad and plans to target music fans around the world as well as in Korea.
