CORTIS don’t follow the script. They wrote one that didn’t exist yet — and the world is still catching up.
They are five teenagers who produce their own music, choreograph their own moves, co-direct their own visuals, and still somehow have time to reshape K-pop’s global identity. Meet CORTIS — BigHit Music’s most radical act since the letters BTS first appeared on a lightstick.
The Room Where It Happens
February in Los Angeles. The Kia Forum roars with the particular electricity of NBA All-Star Weekend — sneakers, courtside fashion, the flash of arena lights bouncing off 18,000 upturned phones. And then: CORTIS walk onstage for the halftime show. Not as guests. Not as a feature. As headliners. The first K-pop act in the event’s history to hold that slot.
Martin, James, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Keonho. Five members moving like a single idea. The crowd — a crowd that came for basketball — doesn’t need explaining. The performance does the translation itself. This is what CORTIS feels like in 2026: a moment that arrives before anyone fully expected it.
The Origin Is the Concept
There are origin stories in K-pop, and then there is CORTIS’s origin story. No grand reveal mythology, no phased “teaser season” that stretches across months. What debuted on August 18, 2025 — with “What You Want,” a treadmill choreography that went viral before the song even charted — felt like five people who had been in the middle of something long before anyone was watching. Because they had been.
From April to May 2024, the five members convened in Los Angeles for a song camp. Not to audition ideas. To build a record. They wrote on all five tracks of their debut EP. They co-choreographed. They ideated their visuals. The label framework held, but inside it, something far less controlled was happening. BigHit had developed a new designation for them: “next-generation creator crew.” It wasn’t marketing copy. It was description.
Leader Martin Edwards — Korean-Canadian, 18 years old, former flag bearer for Iceland at the 2018 Winter Olympics, and the producer behind credits on TXT, ILLIT, and LE SSERAFIM — is the connective tissue of that vision. “We want to express ourselves in the most genuine way possible,” he has said. “As we grow, everything will change. And it will go in the way that it goes.” For a group still in their first year, that is either radical confidence or radical honesty. With CORTIS, it is both.
We’re here to set trends, not to follow them. To do that, you can only push the boundaries and try new things.” — James, CORTIS
Fashion as First Language
The track was called “FaSHioN.” The capitalisation was not accidental. On it, CORTIS slid into a grungy, hip-hop-adjacent world — all distressed leather, silver hardware, baggy silhouettes over skinny fits, biker jackets worn like armour against expectation.
It sounded like A$AP Rocky produced something with Travis Scott and forgot to make it comfortable. It looked like it was styled by five teenagers who had memorised every lookbook ever published and then chose to ignore them.
That tension — between knowing the rules and choosing not to follow them — is the defining characteristic of CORTIS’s visual language. Their fashion identity is not a stylist brief. It is a worldview. Monochrome punctuated by violence. Youth culture worn as critique rather than costume.
“The lure of CORTIS is that everything they do feels thrillingly urgent and alive. They are unhampered by one of K-pop’s favourite tools — the narrative concept — which allows for a live-in-the-moment existence to flourish.”— Dazed, May 2026
The chaos of the early music videos — handheld cameras, Los Angeles landmarks shot like a road movie, movement that felt improvised even when it wasn’t — translated directly into how they dressed: like people who had somewhere specific to be and made that place up themselves. With GREENGREEN (released May 4, 2026), the palette has evolved.
We’re here to set trends, not to follow them. To do that, you can only push the boundaries and try new things.” — James, CORTIS
The title’s doubled word, the vibrant vertical stripe of their limited merch jerseys, the co-directing credit shared with “IDIOTS” and the group itself — all of it signals a band consciously designing their own era, not receiving one. The CORTIS aesthetic has become so legible that it is already being copied. Which, given their name, might be the greatest possible compliment.
The Architecture of Now
Across both EPs, CORTIS have shown a remarkable refusal to belong to any single sonic address. Color Outside the Lines opened with “GO!” — Travis Scott-influenced, high-octane, TikTok-ready before TikTok had been given time to explain why — and closed with moments of actual vulnerability, “heartfelt and sometimes purposely fleeting,” in Martin’s own framing. They called it “a kind of amateurism.” What they meant was: the quality of honesty.
GREENGREEN‘s lead single “REDRED” — the first K-pop title track in recent memory to name itself like a visual glitch — brought in a more fractured sound, industrial undertones behind the swagger, the members’ autotune use now part of the instrument rather than the apology.
The track list includes “Blue Lips,” “Wassup,” “ACAI,” and “YOUNGCREATORCREW” — a song debuted live at the NBA Crossover Concert before it had a release date, which is either excellent strategy or what happens when your creative instinct moves faster than your rollout calendar. Probably both. Every CORTIS music video carries a directing credit that includes the group. Every production sheet lists all five names as writers. Keonho, the youngest at 17, is already a noted contributor to videography. Seonghyeon, also 17, co-produces. There are no fixed positions. There are no quiet members. There is only the collective and the standard it sets for itself.
“CORTIS is a team effort. Not just us five but our crew behind us. For the future, I wish CORTIS can be a very big creative household.” — James, CORTIS
What They Are Shifting
The K-pop industry has spent the last decade building an extraordinarily efficient machine for manufacturing global pop stars. Production pipelines, training systems, visual rollout strategies — all refined to a near-science. What CORTIS represents is the question the machine was not designed to answer: what happens when the idol also controls the means of production?
They are not the first group to write their own music. They are not the first to speak about creative autonomy. But they arrived with receipts: a debut album that went two million in sales before their first birthday as a group, a Billboard 200 entry that no 2025 K-pop rookie matched, and an NBA All-Star halftime slot that placed them in a specific cultural conversation that has historically been closed to K-pop acts entirely. Rolling Stone called it “the coolest K-pop debut” of the year.
The phrase landed because it was accurate in exactly the way CORTIS would have wanted: not about the numbers, but about the feeling. And then there is the fandom — COER (코어).
The name is constructed from “COR” (from CORTIS) and “~ER” (those who stand together), landing on the English word “core,” as in the deepest, most essential part of something.
It is a declaration of intent: this fandom is not peripheral to what the group is. It is structural. COER has driven pre-save numbers exceeding 565,000 for GREENGREEN before release.
They organised around the NBA halftime show. They built archives within weeks of the group’s debut. The fandom did not grow around CORTIS. It grew with them — which, given the group’s name, is perhaps the most on-brand outcome imaginable.
“It may not look punk to you but it sure as hell feels punk to them — five teenage artists with a previously unseen level of autonomy over their sound and visuals, rattling a creative status quo that’s changed little over four decades.” — Dazed, on CORTIS, 2026
Color — and What Comes After
In June 2026, CORTIS are on the cover of W Korea. They are also booked for Lollapalooza 2026 — alongside Jennie, aespa, and (G)I-DLE — and for KCON Japan and Weverse Con Festival. GREENGREEN is weeks old and already generating the friction that follows any act willing to be polarising rather than palatable. The Dazed profile described them as “bringing punk to K-pop.” The group would probably wince at the label and then use it anyway.
What matters now is not what CORTIS will become. It is what they already are: the most credible argument that K-pop’s next phase belongs to those who refuse to wait for permission.
The industry machinery is still running. But CORTIS broke into the control room before anyone handed them a key — and now they are building something inside it that looks entirely new.
They named themselves after a phrase about drawing outside the lines. Nine months into their career, the lines themselves seem like a different conversation entirely.
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Cover — CORTIS · W Korea, June 2026 Digital Edition
Feature — W Korea Editorial Team · Cover Story: “The Line Breakers”
Talent — CORTIS (Martin, James, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Keonho) · BigHit Music / HYBE
Published by — Kpoppie Magazine · Produced in association with Velocity Entertainment Inc. (Japan / New Zealand)
© 2026 Kpoppie Magazine / Velocity Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.
W Korea is published by Condé Nast Korea. All editorial opinions are those of the contributing writers. All artist quotes sourced from on-record interviews cited herein.