Someone has given NCT 127 notepads. The five bandmates are parked along one side of a wide conference room table, each with hotel stationery and a pen sitting in front of them. It immediately feels like a mistake. When not reflecting on what’s changed for the group in the decade since debut — or heckling each other for misspeaking like they’re still bratty kids living on top of each other in dorms — they’re hunched over, doodling.
Just over 10 years ago, the world was introduced to NCT’s first fixed subgroup (NCT DREAM, WayV and NCT WISH would soon follow) as teenagers getting aggro in science class. In real life, that rowdy energy has dispersed into a mellower campus crush vibe — if you squint, the drawing could almost be confused for diligent note-taking — but the septet’s seventh studio album, Blingy, is just as loud as ever. “I wanted to make a statement,” Chicago native Johnny says: “NCT 127 is back.”
K-pop’s noisiest mavericks have had a relatively quiet couple of years. In 2024, group leader Taeyong enlisted in the South Korean military for compulsory service; deep-voiced, dimpled Jaehyun was next to go. By the end of 2025, they were almost done, while two more — Doyoung and Jungwoo — cycled in, leaving five members (a head count rounded out by Johnny, Yuta and Haechan) to shoulder the weight of this comeback.
When they sit down with Billboard, the rollout is still in progress. Across the table, Taeyong is making scribbles that look plucked straight out of the mind of Bart Simpson: a disembodied robot head; messy stars; a stick-figure animal being beamed up by a UFO; a bird-man with abs and pecs — and, in a nod to Blingy’s raucous lead single, “Piñata,” live debuted at KCON LA the previous Friday (Aug. 14), a donkey with stumpy little legs.
A few days later, the headlining set is still on their minds. There’s good reason for it to be: “It’s one of the hardest performances we’d ever had to get ready for,” Johnny says. To offset lineup changes, the guys ultimately had to redistribute lines for nearly every song on the setlist.
This is to say nothing of all the work that went into Blingy’s title track, which was only briefly teased at KCON. Taeyong, who co-created its choreo, recalls the first “full power” run-through: “I wasn’t even dripping sweat. I was just soaked,” he says. “Like some exercise…”
“CrossFit,” Johnny says, then spells out: “H-I-I-T.”
“A bit like CrossFit,” Taeyong laughs. “Maybe even harder.”
While the leader had proposed a few cuts, his teammates rejected them outright. “I felt it then,” Taeyong says. “The members really don’t change when it comes to ambition about performance and being uncompromising with what we show. We all have this desire.” He chuckles to himself: “I have it a bit less. But with everyone’s help, I was able to do it, too.”
Now in his thirties, Taeyong acts like his stamina has fallen off a cliff, but his post-military activities suggest otherwise: within six months of discharging, he released his debut solo studio album WYLD. Granted, it was “easier to make music in the military,” he admits. He had a hand in every track on his own project — but after returning to his group, Taeyong says he barely has time to listen to music, let alone produce it.
Jaehyun took a brief vacation before throwing himself into album preparations. He didn’t have much difficulty settling back in — that is, if his dry witticisms are to be believed. “Music is my life,” he says, completely straight-faced. “Always music. Today music, tomorrow music.”
And a lot was riding on that music. So, when it came time to pick the centerpiece for this era, there was a three-way split: management liked “Piñata” so much they tried to tip the scales in its favor; A&R championed the chest-beating “Legacy”; the members, however, threw their weight behind the impossible-to-ignore “Blingy.”
“It’s a song that gets your attention,” Johnny says. “I wanted people to stop and listen if they were walking by.”
Turning heads is far from a new goal for them. To this day, the title track from NCT 127’s best-selling album Sticker (and its cacophonous flute) is subject to hot debate: “It’s one of those songs where either you hate it, or you love it,” Johnny says. “We try to make people who hate it love it, but sometimes you don’t. We kinda just started to understand that.”
It’s this brash, unselfconscious style — which they call “Neo” — that’s so successful at bringing fans into the fold, he argues: “Because they are like, ‘What the heck is this?’” Jaehyun adds: “From the start, we had to be experimental.” And it’s grown into a calling card.
But it would be a mistake to chalk NCT 127’s music up to just noise. Despite the project’s on-the-nose title, Blingy contains multitudes: pinballing hip-hop banger “IKR” conducts its chaos with unexpected minimalism (they recorded early in the day for a morning rasp); the lightweight “Day After Day” has magical drum-n-bass swerves.
“It raises the question,” Johnny asks, holding this mixed bag up against the singularity of “Sticker,” “What is Neo?” For ultra-capable vocalist Haechan, deep cut “Mad Dog” is the pinnacle of that sound. It’s acidic and abrasive; crucially, the bridge hits like a melodic chaser to its squeaky dubstep drop, making the contrast all the more delicious.
Perhaps that’s why, despite the group’s sonic identity having been discussed to death — “I don’t really know what Neo is anymore,” Yuta huffs a laugh from beneath his long black fringe — Taeyong sums it up rather easily: “There is no Neo song,” he says. “The members’ voices are Neo.”
With Doyoung and Jungwoo gone, Blingy tends to tread lighter on the crazy vocals. (Though not completely: “Piñata,” for one, flexes Yuta’s rock chops.) Yet as a happy surprise for fans — and their fellow members — the pair of enlisted singers show up on “127 Million Miles,” a heartfelt thank you to the many faces in the crowd and beyond. Taeyong explains of the song: “Even if we’re that far apart, we’re still able to be together.”
In July, “Did you miss us?” billboards went up across two major U.S. cities, leading fans to believe that North American dates would be added to NCT 127’s upcoming REDLINE tour. Johnny took it upon himself to personally dispel the rumors. “I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up,” he says with a small grimace. “I felt like that would make it worse.”
“There was a big picture,” he hand-waves. “But let’s not get into it.”
For the time being, the guys will “reach out as much as possible,” though Johnny adds that another tour is “definitely planned” for next year. “When all of the members are able to work together [in 2027], we’ll definitely try to make another album right away,” he says. What lies beyond is up in the air. “2028.. we’ll try, but we don’t know. Let’s just get through 2027.”
This year, meanwhile, finds them in flux. With the sprawling NCT clan turning a decade old, most of the members’ contracts were up for renewal; when April rolled around, SM Entertainment golden boy Mark Lee became the first to not move forward with the company — or the band.
Johnny emphasizes how long the whole process took in reality. Nothing was done in haste. “The decisions that everybody made weren’t made in a few months,” he says. “It really did take a lot of time and effort and conversation with each other to come upon the conclusion we came upon.”
They kicked off discussions over two years ago, before members began to enlist. “At the beginning, before I went to the military, we all got together and talked about it,” Taeyong says. “I guess each of us had a direction we were thinking about and we each wanted different things, so I think it was unavoidable that we took a longer time to think about it.”
“Ultimately, I can’t say that everyone is completely satisfied,” he concedes, while also effectively putting a lid on the conversation: “But I think we are able to work in a better environment than before.”
With this new seniority came greater creative control. Taeyong fiddles with his phone, looking for an unchosen demo version of an album track. It’s a move not without its objections. “Don’t play it,” Johnny cringes. “Ugh!” Yuta echoes: “What if she likes it too much?” This alternative melody — by the members’ own estimations — wasn’t up to par, so it didn’t go to press. “Hated [this] other version,” Johnny says. “Just gonna say that.”
Do they often find themselves having differences of opinion with their A&R team now? “Always,” Yuta nods.
Taeyong agrees: “I think we have more complaints after renegotiating.” The rest of the members crack up, but Yuta has an amendment to make. “Only him,” he says, poking a thumb at Taeyong. Was he not as forthcoming with his thoughts in the past? “Oh, I complained a lot before,” Taeyong smirks. “And now I’m just complaining even more.”
But they also recognize they’re in good hands for the most part. “We tell the company our opinion,” Haechan says, “[and] resolve it by talking it through. When it comes to songs, the A&R team comes to us with a certain vision, so we keep that in mind as we’re thinking about the album.”
Although Taeyong can be admittedly hard to budge, he’s not closed off to outside information, either. He doesn’t confuse ego for maturity. “While signing a contract with [SM subsidiary] KRM, I came to learn some things,” he says. “At first, I had a lot of complaints about there being so many foreign producers in the credits [of our albums].”
But time has shifted his perspective on the matter. “Just because they’re foreign producers doesn’t mean they’re making songs from a place of ignorance,” he says. “These individuals have come over to Korea and are doing song camps. They’re learning about Korean culture and K-pop’s origins, and they know more than I expected. It’s within these song camps where their culture and our culture come together.”
His worries about the K-pop industry divesting itself from the “K” weren’t unfounded. But whereas some K-pop artists seem to chase after the U.S. pop airwaves, NCT 127 has always utilized creative partnerships between (often Black American) producers from the West — Dem Jointz, Patrick “J.Que” Smith, Harvey Mason Jr. — and SM’s genius home team to enhance their sound rather than strip it of complexity.
Johnny offers up a metaphor. “Do you know what an MBTI is?” he asks. “It’s an easy way to explain who you are. But does that define you? I would say no.” The eldest bandmate isn’t too hung up on the particulars: “You can label us however you want,” he says. “But, in the end, we kind of made a genre.”
And that’s something they can call all their own.
Additional translation provided by Gene Kim.
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