Are "Young Creator Crew" and "Young CreCrew" different? Looking at CORTIS's activities in 2026, they seem to be. The former term, frequently used under the name of a group of young creators, became a word that described the group starting from when CORTIS debuted last year with "COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES." This is a bold new group that created over 300 candidate songs over two years, selected the best from the songwriting camp, actively contributed ideas to music videos and choreography, and asked people to focus on the message contained in their songs. The song CORTIS created to confidently express this concept and attitude through music is "YOUNGCREATORCREW." In our memory, only "Young CreCrew" remains. This is because CORTIS itself asked to be called that way. Call us Young CreCrew to the old generation, not yolrehihi, Young CreCrew.
A K-pop rookie group less than a year into its debut is still busy making itself known. It must express the identity embedded in its name and the carefully planned concept through various stages and content. New songs are released and the group appears on various programs. With just two EPs, CORTIS skipped that cumbersome explanatory stage. The "GREENGREEN" EP recorded over 2.31 million album sales in its first week of release, and the title track "REDRED" made a remarkable achievement by reaching number one on the daily chart of Melon, a streaming platform that K-pop boy groups were thought to never be able to reach. Among boy groups that debuted within the past five years, they have secured the most followers on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
Along with massive success comes a sense of discord. Its basis can be found in CORTIS itself. The group that produced one of the biggest hit songs of the first half of 2026 is already holding solo concerts and touring overseas festival stages. By naming the concert "PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN" and filling 100 minutes with 12 songs, they created stages of a completely different nature from the idol concerts K-pop fans expect, which sparked controversy. The group repeatedly shouted at the venue for people to put their phones down and mobilized professional dancers to create a mosh pit, drawing circles and colliding with bodies. "MONEYMONEYMONEY," a track on the extended album released on the 24th, also came out during the tour. The agency introduced it as a song containing the members' honest thoughts about money, but the public only remembers the lyric "adding zero to zero in the account as if it's Han-ro." Not all topics are necessarily positive.
To explain both achievements and controversies together, it is necessary to look at the new concept of K-pop self-production that CORTIS advocates. Typically in K-pop, self-production refers to either forming a team centered on enfants terribles who showed creative talent even before debut, or going through countless trials and errors to teach trainees the methods of music production and then bestowing the value of creation based on this. In other words, self-production was an adjective meant to build and prove musical credibility, something rarely given to idol groups, by the mere fact that members create music themselves.
CORTIS is different. They are not idols who came to do self-production. They are idols designed and planned on the premise of self-production. A mega agency that can comfortably tolerate failure is investing capital and time to experiment whether talent can be nurtured. Confident that creating idols can be trained from the beginning, the boys were trained from a young age to convert what they saw and heard into music. The ambitions of teenagers to present the trendiest music are diligently produced through producer Supreme Boy and songwriting camps with renowned young creators around the world. In that process, each member develops their own tastes and gains a conviction that their work is real. At the famous American record shop Amoeba Music, names of rock bands like Alice in Chains, Oasis, and Pixies—names rarely heard from the lips of idols—appear, and on stage, aggressive performances by famous hip-hop stars like Travis Scott unfold.
For this kind of group, K-pop is a matter of selective choice. To fans who cannot put down recording devices because they don't want to miss their favorite's appearance, they say to put down their phones. Their first solo concert lacks fan-meeting elements like idol cover stages or solo corners that would naturally appear, fan service segments consisting of aegyo and challenges. Under the concept of pseudo-romance, CORTIS seeks to transform the strange love of K-pop, maintained through emotional labor and service by artists, into independent and cool friendship. The irony of this selective choice is that they themselves are precisely the most up-to-date model of K-pop planning drawn from the extreme. The production of a large agency, numerous overseas workforce, budgets to draw rough music video ideas into high-quality results, and the resources to tour solo world concerts and overseas festivals within a year of debut support CORTIS's creative freedom. Even if someone questions sloppy lyrics and expressions bordering on negligence, even if mediocre music results, the opportunity to create continues to be given. The attitude of a child stacking coins in an arcade to play games and a challenger who must accomplish a "one-coin challenge" with a single coin are bound to be different.
Is the freedom thus secured working effectively? The grammar of "Young CreCrew" is actually not new. K-pop fans astonished by CORTIS's lyrics seem to have forgotten the onomatopoeia repetition of the hook song era when no meaning could be found and the listing of nonexistent words. Remarkably, this grammar is simultaneously one of the latest trends operating among the youngest creators around the world. Musicians like Xaviersobased, fakemink, EsDeeKid, and Nettspend, whom CORTIS might consider music colleagues, represent a music style called jerk. Over the bombardment of chaotic electronic sounds, they spout nonsensical words. Their songs are very short, at most around two minutes, and the lyrics are fragmented.
Now it cannot even be called underground. According to streaming platform SoundCloud statistics, British underground rap listening increased by 297% over the past year. Looking at this year's lineup for Rolling Loud, the world's largest hip-hop festival, their names appear just below superstars like Don Toliver, Playboi Carti, and Ken Carson. They are only unknown in Korea, but already a mainstream and new music supply source among world major labels. It is natural for a large agency to capture this trend. It is also natural for CORTIS, which claims to be the youngest and most unique creator of this era, to follow the trend. It could also be seen as harsh to ask friends, most of whom are still in their teens, to write very deep-level lyrics.
However, the reason it is difficult to fully immerse in CORTIS's "creation" also lies here. Jerk is a trace of deficiency. It is a creation where minorities marginalized from the normalcy displayed by society capture life together yet separately through hyperconnected internet networks. Because short finger movements must be grasped, it is stimulating and does not need to be made longer. CORTIS has no experience. They have gone through an elite idol training system that can chew up and swallow electronic music, hip-hop, and rock, and learned how to use music equipment. The music they admire and express was also "learned" from the internet. It is not direct experience such as being discriminated against or suffering, or losing one's mind over an aggressive rage beat of a hip-hop star and colliding bodies. Indirect experience through shorts and YouTube vlogs that display it, and a life vaguely imitating after debut, is precisely the cradle of CORTIS's creation. The reason they appeared on Epik High's Tablo's podcast and revealed why CORTIS has no love songs is because they "went through trainee life and debuted directly, and make music based on the actual lives and experiences they have lived."
Among criticisms leveled at CORTIS, many points are valid, but it is difficult to agree with pretense or falsification. The attitudes of Martin, Seonghyun, Joohoon, and Seonghyun Gunho are clear. They are listing the hip elements displayed on social media, saying what they want to become, what kind of musician they are, and that they will surprise the world. That attitude pours out in language of distinction and refusal, and if you don't feel it, it's your loss. In a world where short videos continue endlessly, it is a fitting theme song for a deteriorated modern society where the will to understand deeply and think long has disappeared. If CORTIS's music sounds shallow, it is because it is a result of transferring the sensibility most people currently share. However, the irony surrounding CORTIS grows even larger because of the confusion of identity as the very K-pop new product prototype the group rejects, and the lack of persuasive language beyond attitude. I believe songs like "Joyride," "Lullaby," and "Blue Lips," forgotten in the fun, are more needed.
Let us return to the initial question. Are Young Creator Crew and Young CreCrew different? They are. If narrowing that gap is CORTIS's task, dedication to creation saying "we will repay with good songs" cannot be a solution. What an agency that tolerates failure and supplies fun to reality can never give is perhaps leisure and time. They need experience to interestingly recognize their fragmented position in K-pop and to articulate the various elements they find interesting with rich and refined words. Rather than saying they will surprise the world, I want to hear a CORTIS that talks about what in the world they have seen. Then "Young CreCrew" will not be a disparaging term but a term of endearment.
Kim Do-heon (Popular Music Critic) / zener1218@gmail.com
<Photo source=Big Hit Music>
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