Red Velvet

Who are Red Velvet?

Red Velvet is a five-member girl group of Irene, Seulgi, Wendy, Joy and Yeri, whose group activity is run by SM Entertainment. Their fandom is ReVeluv. They debuted as a four-piece of Irene, Seulgi, Wendy and Joy on KBS’s Music Bank on 1 August 2014, performing ‘Happiness’. The Korea Herald noted that it was SM’s first new girl group in five years, since f(x).

Red and velvet

The name holds two pictures. The introduction to the debut single described red as “a strong, alluring colour” and velvet as “a soft, feminine feel”, and the group’s records have moved between the two. Their first full album, The Red (2015), was introduced as carrying the colours the “Red” in the name suggests, and The Velvet followed the next March with “soft, emotional Velvet-style music”. Of the second full album, Perfect Velvet (November 2017), IZM’s Jung Yu-na wrote that “the velvet identity surfaced again, and the tilt of a scale that had leaned one way narrowed”.

The records as five

The first record after Yeri joined was the first mini album, Ice Cream Cake, on 17 March 2015; its introduction said her joining was meant to widen the team’s musical range. The Red Summer (July 2017) was the group’s first summer project, and its title track ‘Red Flavor’ reached number one on the Circle Chart digital chart. Idology’s Oyo called it a track that seems to declare “summer now means Red Velvet”.

The January 2018 repackage The Perfect Red Velvet carried ‘Bad Boy’, a hip-hop-based R&B dance track. The ‘ReVe Festival’ series followed in 2019, and its introduction explained that ‘ReVe’ is short for Red Velvet and also the French word for dream. ‘Psycho’, the title track of ‘The ReVe Festival’ Finale that December, made Billboard’s list of the year’s K-pop songs. ‘Feel My Rhythm’ (March 2022) samples Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’.

Chill Kill (13 November 2023) was their first full album in six years. Its introduction called the mood “a bright tragedy”, and IZM’s Son Min-hyeon described the title track as “a graceful fusion of red and velvet that carries on from ‘Peek-A-Boo’ and ‘Psycho’”. The tenth-anniversary mini album Cosmic came out on 24 June 2024 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 145, and on the anniversary itself, 1 August, the group released the fan song ‘Sweet Dreams’.

Apart, then five again

In 2025 Wendy and Yeri completed their exclusive contracts with SM Entertainment and signed with other agencies. In the meantime Wendy released her third solo EP, Cerulean Verge, Yeri acted in film and television, and Irene toured Asia solo for the first time. Irene and Seulgi, the group’s first unit, debuted in 2020 with the mini album Monster, and in September 2026 they began in Japan with their first Japanese mini album, Cheetah, and a seven-city tour (story).

The mini album Velvet Summer came out with five tracks on 3 August 2026, the group’s first full-line-up record in two years and two months since Cosmic. Joy wrote the lyrics of the title track, ‘Surfin’ Boy’, on her own. Seulgi said their earlier summer songs had been “intense and full of energy” and this one had “a more ‘velvety’ summer mood”; Wendy called it “a languid, mature summer feeling”. The background to the comeback is in this story.

Where to start

Official music videos, ‘Surfin’ Boy’ among them, premiere on SM Entertainment’s SMTOWN YouTube channel, while the Red Velvet channel collects performance and choreography videos alongside its “Red Velvet Originals” series.