NewJeans Named Most Impactful 4th-Gen Girl Group by Korean Fans

A single question on theqoo, one of South Korea's largest fan communities, produced a remarkably one-sided result. Asked which fourth-generation girl group song had the most impact on K-pop, commenters converged on NewJeans with little real debate, though they disagreed on which specific song to name.

The songs in contention

The titles that came up most often were Attention, Hype Boy, and Ditto, the trio of tracks NewJeans released across their 2022 debut push. Several commenters treated them as a single body of work rather than picking one: "it's hard to pick one representative song," one wrote, effectively arguing that the impact was cumulative.

The only serious alternative came from fans of aespa's Next Level, the 2021 single that dominated search charts and spawned a wave of cover videos, particularly for its point choreography. "So many people copied the dance," one commenter noted. Another initially leaned toward Next Level before landing on NewJeans: "I used to think Next Level, but NewJeans really changed the entire concept that girl groups were going for."

What "impact" meant to the thread

The consensus was not simply about chart performance or fandom size. Commenters used the word direction repeatedly: NewJeans shifted what producers and agencies thought a girl group could sound like, moving the default away from the maximalist production that defined much of the early fourth-generation sound. "They literally changed the direction of music," one post read. Another called them "a wall," the Korean fan community shorthand for an act that sets a standard others cannot easily clear.

That framing carries weight. In the two years following NewJeans' debut, a measurable number of girl group releases adopted softer textures, retro-influenced production, and stripped-back choreography, a shift industry observers frequently traced back to the group's early singles. Whether any single track deserves the full credit for that is debatable, but the thread suggests Korean fans assign it collectively to that debut era rather than to one song.

For now, the early returns on this particular question point in one direction. "NewJeans is a wall" may be three words, but as a critical verdict from the audience that follows this music most closely, it is not one the rest of the fourth generation has yet answered.