Biography
GFriend (Korean: Yeoja Chingu) is a six-member: Sowon (Kim Sowon), Yerin (Jung Yerin), Eunha (Eunha), Yuju (Choi Yuju), SinB (Sinb), and Umji (Umji) South Korean girl group formed by Source Music in 2015. They made their debut with the EP Season of Glass on January 15, 2015. Their five-track EP Season of Glass The album debuted at number twelve on Gaon's weekly chart. GFriend won several 2015 female rookie awards and has garnered momentum since their debut despite being from a small company.
The group's main concepts are "powerful innocent" (an innocent concept with knife-like choreography) and "passionate melancholy" (an orchestral and sentimental sound), but they are always reinventing themselves. Also, the music videos follow GFriend's signature storytelling.
The group garnered international attention after a fan-taken video of GFriend members continuing and completing a performance of "Me Gustas Tu" despite continuously falling on a slippery stage went viral in September 2015. The group was praised for their professionalism, especially Yuju, who fell a total of eight times and suffered a twisted finger during the performance. On September 17, 2015, GFriend made headlines again as the only girl group to be nominated in the 2015 MTV Europe Music Awards "Best Korean Act" category alongside boy groups B1A4, BTS, Got7, and VIXX. "Me Gustas Tu" entered the Gaon Year-End Top 100 chart as the 38th best selling song of 2015. "Me Gustas Tu" and "Glass Bead" were also ranked 18th and 44th respectively in the 2015 Bugs Year-End Top 100.
On January 25, 2016, GFriend released their third EP titled Snowflake with the lead single "Rough". "Rough" is the last song to complete GFriend's high school concept trilogy along with "Glass Bead" and "Me Gustas Tu". The album debuted at number ten on Billboard's World Albums Chart, and the music video of "Rough" on YouTube ranked number three in top ten "Most Viewed K-Pop Videos Around the World in January 2016". "Rough" was also ranked 13th in Billboard's 20 Best K-Pop Songs of 2016: Critic's Picks. At the end of the year show 2016 KBS Song Festival, the peak viewer ratings for the whole show were recorded during GFriend's "Rough" performance at 10.3%. "Rough" also became the most downloaded song in 2016 according to Gaon Chart's 2016 Year End Download Chart.
Their sixth EP, Time for the Moon Night, set a new record for the group, taking the top spot in 10 countries around the world on iTunes. It also debuted at number #1 on top Download, Album & Social chart on Korea's top chart Gaon, and sold more than 84,000 copies in South Korea. The following week, it was reported that the group tied with Girls' Generation and Twice as the girl groups with the most entries in the Top 10 of the Billboard World Albums Chart, with 5 entries each. In the second week of album promotion, GFriend won six awards in South Korean music programs, making "Time for the Moon Night" the first song of 2018 to win all the prizes in musical programs. On October 10, GFriend released their first Japanese single album, "Memoria (Time for the moon night)". The single album debuted at no. 6 on the Oricon weekly singles chart and no. 5 on the Billboard Japan weekly top singles sales.
On January 14, 2019, GFriend released their second studio album, Time for Us, with the lead single "Sunrise". Time for Us became the group's highest selling Korean album with more than 86,000 copies sold based on the Gaon Chart.
On February 3, 2020, GFriend released their eighth EP, Labyrinth, with the lead single "Crossroads". This marked the group's first Korean comeback after the acquisition of Source Music by Big Hit Entertainment in 2019.
