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If it seems like your favorite K-pop star is everywhere all the time when they have a new album or tour to promote, there’s a good reason for that. In a new chat with The Hollywood Reporter ENHYPEN member Jake broke down the rigors of the K-pop fame machine, telling the magazine that “you can’t really expect to have a normal life,” when you’re thrust into the genre’s hype cycle.
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“Other K-pop artists or other K-pop seniors that have been doing this for longer than me. They know what I’ve gone through,” he said of the grueling scheduled of rehearsals, recording and promotion. “They all went through the same thing. I feel like it’s important to share what you’re feeling because if you want to ask advice for anything related to your life or my life as a K-pop artist, there’s no one that can relate to it other than the same people that are doing it. I don’t really know a lot of people, to be honest.”
Jake, 23, who slid into a producer role on the septet’s recent album, The Sin : Vanish, said stepping behind the boards “sparked something inside me that I didn’t really know that I had,” because, if he’s being honest, sometimes being a K-pop idol is “very repetitive. We wake up, we have a very tight and set schedule down to the minute. We have to wake up at this hour, this minute. We end our schedule at this [time]. I used to enjoy that.”
And while he likes that kind of regimented schedule and said he’s just naturally “wired that way,” sometimes without him realizing it the non-stop schedule can get “very tiring.” Switching things up and trying his hand at production, though, has helped Jake escape that exhausting cycle, if only for a little while. Jake said that taking the helm on the new LP’s opening narration track, “The Beginning,” and the song “Sleep Tight” was one of his personal goals for the year.
“It’s the first time I really worked on the track. I would usually just work on the melodies or the topline on a song, but it’s the first time that I really just started working on it from scratch,” he said. “It was a very new experience. I found out that I might be better at the producing of the track. A very close producer that I always worked with, he told me that I might be better at doing the track instead of the top melody. It just all came along together very smoothly, which is kind of surprising because it’s the first time for me to really work on a song on an album. I was very lucky and very surprised.”
Learning a new skill is key to staying relevant in what Jake confirmed is the rapidly evolving K-pop universe, one that is quick to react to trends and changes as the industry cranks out a steady stream of new acts, each striving to carve a unique lane to break through to global audiences. “I feel like the fact about K-pop that every K-pop artist knows but does’t want to talk about is that [the] K-pop industry is very competitive, right?,” Jake said. “We all say we don’t want it to be, or we want everyone to do their own thing… Every K-pop artist is different.”
Jake said the ever-changing, “fast-paced” series of concepts his fellow K-pop bands roll out in search of a leg up on the competition keeps the genre as up-to-date as any other. “You have to be on top of everything,” the singer said. “We would be lying if we said we didn’t feel any pressure. We are very confident in our abilities to always put out something different or a different concept. I feel like we’re confident in that way… We all try to be the first to do something and be the first to do something different, and I think we definitely did that for this album.”
Don’t get him wrong, though, Jake loves what he does and wouldn’t change it for anything. “We enjoy performing in front of our fans, and I think that’s what motivates us during the hard times, which is before we come back, before we put out an album, the few months or the half a year that we have to put in doing the music videos, recordings, making the album, that’s the hard bit,” he explained. “Just the thought of putting this album out and singing this song in front of our fans is what helps us get through the few months.”
ENHYPEN recently released the trailer for ENHYPEN [WALK THE LINE SUMMER EDITION] IN CINEMAS, a tour documentary for the film that will hit movie theaters for a limited engagement on March 5 and 7.