ARTMS Drop 'Hyper-Ego' and Every Member Tried Rapping for the First Time

ARTMS released their new album Hyper-Ego today, and even before a note plays, the concept carries weight: member Haseul is recovering from shoulder surgery and could not fully participate, yet her voice opens the record anyway, floating through the intro track From Wings To Soul like a signal from somewhere just out of reach.

The remaining four members, Heejin, Kim Lip, Jinsoul, and Choerry, framed that absence deliberately. Rather than working around it or calling attention to it as a hardship, they built it into the album's structure. The intro functions, in their words, as something like the Lunar Gateway, a proposed orbital station that orbits the moon without landing on its surface: present, essential, and never quite touching down. It's an unusually poetic piece of album architecture for a K-pop release.

Heejin, speaking to press in Gangnam the day before the release, described the shift from ARTMS's earlier work in clear terms. "If our past albums were a gathering of wounded souls and a source of comfort, this album is about those wounded souls finding a new self, breaking out of the shell, and expanding into a new world." That framing, the egg cracking open, runs through the album's title and its visual language.

The group has been together in various forms for a decade now, originally debuting under LOONA, and Hyper-Ego feels like a record made by artists who know exactly what their audience expects and are willing to stress-test that. Kim Lip was candid about the anxiety that came with the direction. "At first I had my own prejudices about ourselves and felt nervous. There was a real dilemma about whether to choose accessibility or the deeper music our core fanbase wants." She added that she believes this album answers both sides of that question, a confident claim, and one the music seems designed to back up.

The sonic evidence is on Blue Blood, which combines hyperpop and J-Core in a way that sits well outside ARTMS's previous work. The song rejects the biological fact that blood is red, insisting instead on something rarer and self-mythologizing, a declaration that the group intends to move past physical limitations into something more symbolic. It is one of the more extreme genre experiments a group at this career stage tends to greenlight, and the fact that it made the final tracklist says something about where their creative confidence is sitting right now.

That confidence extended to a decision that surprised even the members themselves. All four, described by Kim Lip as deeply attached to their vocal identities, took on rap verses for the first time across the album. "By rapping, I discovered a voice I didn't know I had," she said. "A new side of myself, sounds I didn't know I could make." For a group whose fans have spent years mapping individual vocal colors with real precision, that kind of self-discovery is exactly the kind of detail that will land.

The visual concept takes a similarly layered approach. ARTMS released two music videos simultaneously, one real, one fake, both presented as legitimate, and the gap between them is the point. Jinsoul cited Kill Bill as a visual reference, describing the styling as a deliberate collision of school uniforms and weapons: "simple but distinctive characters" in her words. The dual-video strategy asks the audience directly which version is real, a question that doubles as a comment on how heavily constructed the idol industry's image-making already is.

Heejin shared one detail that puts the fanbase's investment in context: a mother of a fan told her that her daughter only leaves the house once a year, for ARTMS's annual Paris concert. The story wasn't shared as a marketing point, Heejin used it to explain how the group thinks about their own storytelling. "Our worldview isn't something we determine unilaterally," she said. "It's built together, based on the inspiration our fans give us."

With Hyper-Ego, ARTMS have pushed past the careful, sacred atmosphere of Virtual Angel and landed somewhere louder and stranger. The album's opening flight has just begun.