Client: Rolling Stone
NCT 127 sit on the kind of colorful, hard plastic chairs you’ll find in offices or assembly halls anywhere in the world. The hair is mussed; faces are bare of makeup; their off-duty wardrobe consists of white tees, denim overshirts, jeans, and loose-fitting trousers. The bandmates — leader Taeyong, Jaehyun, Haechan, Doyoung, Mark, Johnny, Jungwoo, and Yuta (Taeil is absent due to health reasons) — are in constant motion: slouching, straightening, leaning forward and back, twisting to look at one another, arms and legs crossing and uncrossing, often unconsciously mirroring one another’s positions and expressions.
Jaehyun (one of the band’s three English speakers, alongside Johnny and Mark) is sharing a recent anecdote whereby having gathered to rehearse a song (“an older one,” they say), they realized they’d forgotten the accompanying performance. They looked it up on YouTube, then promptly fell down their own rabbit hole, reminiscing over forgotten hair colors and stylistic choices in videos like “Limitless” (2017) or “Chain” (2018). Haechan, the band’s youngest at 23, sputters over the latter, in which the band had to sultrily grapple with drills, flamethrowers, and chain saws: “There were a lot of fun episodes during shooting,” he says, glancing at his equally bemused teammates. “We just laughed a lot on that [set].”
Their sonic style has been derided by pockets of K-pop’s wider community as “noise music,” yet its hallmarks have brought a new lexicon to K-pop songwriting, particularly for boy groups. Canadian-born Mark shifts in his chair: “We don’t follow trends …” He rubs the back of his neck, wondering if he should go on. “We make the trends.” He laughs, almost cringing, as he says it, but he means it, too. “Whatever we release, we want to make sure it’s from NCT 127, and it can split listeners into two sides, but staying original is what we value the most.”
Taylor Glasby 