There is a version of Huh Yunjin‘s life in which she is a college student right now. She had the acceptance letter. She had paid the deposit. She had spent the better part of two months applying to schools after years of grueling K-pop training in Korea had worn her down and she decided that it was time to try something else.
The call to join LE SSERAFIM came the next day.
“It literally felt like the stars were telling me where to go,” she says, sitting down for Variety’s “Up Next” podcast on what is, notably, her very first podcast ever. (“I love to yap,” she announces immediately, by way of explanation.) Within two weeks of that call, she was on a plane back to South Korea getting ready to debut.
That story, which she tells with the kind of good-humored disbelief that suggests she’s still a little amazed by it herself, has taken on new resonance this month. On June 12, 2026, LE SSERAFIM released “Iconic by Mistake,” a collaboration single with fellow HYBE girl groups KATSEYE and ILLIT — marking the first time K-pop girl groups have released an official song together without forming a supergroup. The track, a shot at the internet haters, debuted at No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. The success, it’s safe to say, is no mistake.
The collaboration is part of a busy stretch for LE SSERAFIM, who released their second studio album “PUREFLOW Pt. 1” on May 22, 2026. The album began with Yunjin interviewing each of her members one-on-one. “The whole narrative started with us, and then we kind of worked around that.” A world tour with new stops in Washington D.C. and Florida is currently underway, and Yunjin has one firm request for the Florida leg: “To my manager, who’s watching, hopefully we can do Epcot.”
Yunjin, born in Seoul and raised in Wisconsin and upstate New York, was a creative kid from the start. She cycled through wanting to be a writer, a painter, an actor, then a stage performer, before landing on songwriting and music as the thing that finally stuck. She taught herself guitar and ukulele from YouTube videos, picking up Taylor Swift’s “15” on the sly from her dad’s old nylon-string classical guitar after watching her sister figure out chords the same way.
K-pop entered the picture for her in 2017, when BTS made history with their performance of “DNA” at the American Music Awards. For Yunjin, who had been navigating questions of identity as a young Korean American, watching that performance was a turning point. She moved to Korea alone at fifteen, tried training at a label for a month, went back to the States to start sophomore year, returned at sixteen, and stayed. In 2018, she competed on the Korean reality survival show “Produce 48” — where she met two of her future LE SSERAFIM members — before being eliminated on episode 11 at rank 26 and continuing to train. Her first dance teacher, assessing her coordination, nicknamed her “giraffe.” She has since outgrown the nickname considerably.
After four years of near-misses and no debut, the burnout caught up with her. She returned home to New York, applied to colleges in a two-month sprint, got in, paid the deposit, and made peace with a different future. Then her phone rang. “I can’t really let go of music,” she says of what she realized during those months away. “I can’t let go of this storytelling dream I have in me.” Two weeks later she was back in Korea making music with LE SSERAFIM.
“They truly are my sisters,” she says of her fellow members. “A lot of it is non-verbal. It’s just something that we feel.” For someone whose path to that sisterhood involved survival shows, multiple years of training, and a college deposit paid the day before her life changed, that feeling took a long time to find.
Her favorite film is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and while she believes there are versions of her in alternate universes out there living entirely different lives, she’s not losing sleep over them: “The life that I’m currently living now is the best version of me that there is.”
