There’s mounting evidence of Seventeen’s cultural dominance around the planet, from sold-out stadium shows and chart-topping albums in the U.S. and Japan to festival-headlining sets in Mexico and Germany. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the group’s home city of Seoul. The area surrounding the headquarters of their label Pledis Entertainment’s parent company, Hybe, is covered in Seventeen. The gloomy and humid weather on a recent May morning doesn’t stop a herd of fans from snapping pictures and taking in the coffee shop across the street, where the faces of Seventeen — comprising members S.Coups, Jeonghan, Joshua, Jun, Hoshi, Wonwoo, Woozi, The 8, Mingyu, DK, Seungkwan, Vernon and Dino — paper the outer walls. Stretched across a nearby bus stop is a banner wishing Joshua a happy birthday. His bandmate DK has his own birthday banner just a few storefronts down. The 28-year-old’s smiling face can be seen in beauty ads running on a loop in Seoul’s subway cars.

The whole city seems to be celebrating the group’s 10th anniversary and the recent release of its fifth studio album, Happy Burstday. A party is held on the man-made islands known as Sebitseom, along Seoul’s Hangang River, featuring a giant floating Seventeen light stick and a first-of-its-kind performance at the nearby Jamsu Bridge. Fans who couldn’t snag a seat to the special performance did anything they could to see the group, even by jumping in yachts that pulled up next to the stage to watch from the water.

It’s hard to imagine Seventeen’s global profile getting any larger, but the group’s ascendance to the top of pop shows no sign of slowing. The 13-member outfit was the world’s biggest group in 2024, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)’s state-of-the-industry report, which tracks sales and streams. The organization ranked Seventeen third in total, just behind solo acts Taylor Swift and Drake and ahead of U.S. household names like Billie Eilish, The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar. Their 2023-2024 Follow Tour in Asia was the highest-grossing K-pop tour of 2024, raking in $98.4 million across 24 shows.

The Hybe building is the ultimate temple to the group’s success, currently wrapped in a message that reads “Seventeen will challenge eternity.” That may be, but there’s little they can do about the march of time. It’s a moment of transition for Seventeen. On one hand — as all K-pop boy groups must do at some point — Seventeen is facing inevitable change as members of the group begin mandatory military service. South Korean law states that all eligible men must enlist before turning 30. Jeonghan, the eldest of the group at 29, and Wonwoo, 28, are currently serving and therefore unable to participate in any promotions. (Both performed on the new album before enlisting.)

At the same time, Seventeen is grappling with change of a more philosophical nature: wrestling over what the band should become. This reckoning perhaps is best exemplified by Happy Burstday’s track list, which features 13 solo songs — one for each member — and only three group tracks. The bandmembers, by their own admission, have focused heavily on group activities until now, even though several of them have also put out solo releases over the past decade.

Any boy group that started as young Seventeen must contend with the quandary of how to age gracefully alongside its music and fans. Somewhat rarely for K-pop, Seventeen’s members have had a heavy hand in the trajectory of their careers, as their label’s founder, Sung Soo Han (whose official title, tellingly, is Master Professional), explains. “The Seventeen members have been deeply involved not only in the creative process but also in shaping the group’s overall direction, making decisions and guiding the team themselves,” he says. Pledis, which Han founded in 2007, has been Seventeen’s label for their entire career. In addition to Seventeen, the agency has produced several domestically popular K-pop groups like After School and NU’EST, along with their latest boy group, TWS, which debuted to great fanfare in 2024.

To understand Seventeen, and why they’ve lasted this long, it’s important to understand the K-pop ecosystem as a whole. It’s not a genre — in fact many groups, including Seventeen, explore several different musical styles throughout their careers — but rather a specific way of promoting and releasing music. What perhaps best defines K-pop is the intensity of its relationship with fans, both on social media and in more intimate in-person encounters. Communication apps allow fans to “text” directly with their favorite K-pop idol. VIP concert tickets might include a send-off, where fans gather inside the stadium as the performers walk through snapping photos and signing “photocards” (another K-pop specialty; think baseball or Pokémon trading cards but instead it’s your favorite artist and it comes with each album). In recent years, K-pop groups have frequently collaborated with Western artists and released English-language songs. Happy Burstday alone includes collaborations with Pharrell Williams and Timbaland. The group released their first English single, “Dar+ling,” in 2022.  

Most members of K-pop groups spend their adolescence preparing for this job under tightly organized trainee programs. Typically run by Korean entertainment companies like Pledis, these programs require aspiring stars to undergo years of grueling vocal, dance and language training for the chance to join a group. Seventeen’s years of apprenticeship were largely broadcast through the online show Seventeen TV, which showcased and introduced Pledis’ trainees. While not all members featured on that show went on to debut with Seventeen, some who left joined other K-pop groups or pursued adjacent entertainment careers. Seven-year contracts are the standard when starting out in K-pop, and in 2021, all 13 members of Seventeen renewed their contract with Pledis Entertainment, a year earlier than expected.

When Seventeen started, K-pop was at a nascent phase globally. “Since their debut, the K-pop landscape has expanded noticeably,” Han says. He adds that the globalization has the company “establishing customized promotional strategies that reflect the cultural characteristics and specific needs of fans in each region.”

Seventeen’s 2015 debut EP, 17 Carat, sold roughly 1,400 albums in its first week on Korea’s Hanteo chart. By contrast, Happy Burstday, released May 26, recorded more than 2.2 million sales in its first day. As impressive as the numbers are, the group’s most significant evolution has been the maturation of its “concept” — a key term in the world of K-pop, where groups might have an overarching storyline of superhuman powers, pirates or vampires — and their visual direction. For most of Seventeen’s career, the focus sonically and visually has been on youth. Over the past few years, as the members grew from teenagers to men, their sound and look have also grown.

On Happy Burstday, Seventeen is experimenting with harder sounds and darker visual themes. “We are ready to reinvent ourselves,” says S.Coups, who sat for an interview alongside three of his bandmates, Joshua, Dino and The 8, in a dance practice room at the Hybe headquarters. The 29-year-old — dressed casually before he rushes off to get into the full glam an 11-member photo shoot requires — serves as the group’s leader as well as the head of its rap unit (one of three Seventeen teams, along with the performance and vocal units). Onstage, S.Coups is a commanding, charismatic presence. Offstage, among his fellow group members, he seems lighthearted and playful, laughing throughout the conversation. Unlike Western boy groups, the leader is not an unofficial designation (like NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake or One Direction’s Harry Styles) but a well-defined role typically involving logistical responsibilities. These days, however, the rapper says he considers himself “a member of Seventeen rather than the leader” because of how his group mates have stepped up.

“We are standing at a new starting line, preparing for a new path ahead and ready to blaze a new trail,” S.Coups continues. The move to include solo tracks on the album was part of a long-term strategy. “Most of the members are going to enlist in the military soon. Up until now, we’ve mostly focused on our group promotions,” says 28-year-old Hoshi, the leader of the performance unit. Another strong personality onstage, Hoshi is calm and unfailingly polite, asking his group member Vernon, a native English speaker, to offer this reporter water before he fully sits down. 

“We would like to show more of our individualities, each of the members’ personalities and capabilities, so that when the time comes and we get back together again as a group, we‘ll be able to showcase ourselves as a better Seventeen,” adds Hoshi. The group has already begun this process through subunit releases, in which smaller configurations of the group will release a single or EP separate from Seventeen albums. Hoshi is a member of the unit BSS, along with vocalists DK and Seungkwan, and recently released a single album under the two-person unit HxW with Woozi. Jeonghan and Wonwoo released a subunit single album last year, prior to enlisting, under the name JxW. 

“I just tried to make music that was genuine, that reflected our wholeheartedness and that was what our fans loved best and what we prefer to do as well,” says Woozi. The 28-year-old is arguably Seventeen’s “maestro,” to quote the title of the group’s 2024 single, as he’s spent the past decade shaping the group’s identity as Seventeen’s lead producer. The bleached-blond Busan native, who in our interview sits contemplatively among group members Mingyu, Jun and Seungkwan, is the leader of the vocal team. The unit structure is tied to the group’s name: 13 members, three units and one team, totaling Seventeen. Although the members are assigned to a specific unit, each member might sing, rap and dance in the group; their unit is their specialty.

The tribulations of adolescence have been the central theme of Seventeen’s music from the beginning, but they’ve also defined the members’ relationships with one another as they have spent their entire young adulthood together. “We were housemates at one point for a long time, and that means we had to go through the good moments, bad moments, happy moments, angry moments at the same time,” says Dino, a member of the performance unit.

Despite being one of the eldest in his family, Dino is, at 26, the youngest in Seventeen. When he debuted with the band, he effectively gained 12 older brothers, who alternately tease and care for him. S.Coups, sitting beside Dino for this conversation, breaks into giggles when I ask Dino about some of the ribbing he’s been the target of over the past decade. “I think it really helped me grow more mature very quickly, and I think I learned many more lessons than a normal kid my age would learn at that age,” he says.

Despite having not chosen their bandmates — that was Pledis’ job — the members of Seventeen say they share an ironclad bond to one another, and an equally strong commitment to the group, which remains their anchor. Last year, Jun, the only one seriously pursuing an acting career, had to sit out the North American leg of their 2024 Right Here World Tour and the group’s Lollapalooza Berlin gig because he was shooting a film and television series in China. Yet despite his acting ambitions, he was determined to return for the group’s latest release. “I had my alone time for some time, and now I’m back with the group again,” the 28-year-old says. “In the lead-up to this album, I put a lot of thought into how I can showcase a new side of myself during this promotion.”

The bond may never have been broken, but it’s surely been strained, as would any relationship that involves seeing one another nearly every day for a decade. Mingyu, a member of the rap unit, jokes that they’ve worked things out “through endless fights,” which causes fellow group mate Seungkwan, a member of the vocal unit and subunit BSS, to jump in to clarify. “We’ve never taken it physically or hit each other,” the 27-year-old explains.

Adds Mingyu, “Scars have to be made and healed, made and healed.”

“There isn’t an age gap [anymore],” Joshua, a member of the vocal unit and an L.A. native, says. And, adds Seungkwan, “Even though it was [Pledis] that brought us together, we’re now almost like family.”

Nearly all the members of Seventeen were teenagers when they debuted. As positive as they are, they acknowledge the difficulties of growing up in the public eye. “We’ve been doing this since we were teenagers, so we don’t know a life of being unknown throughout our 20s,” says Vernon, a member of the rap unit who was born in New York before moving to Korea at a young age. The fully bilingual 27-year-old regularly intervenes to clarify a translation for his group members, Hoshi and DK, and even stops the conversation briefly to praise the translator on how skilled she is. 

Vernon says the unrelenting spotlight has made the group more “reserved,” a word that feels at odds with Vernon’s current punk-inspired look but in keeping with his pensive personality. “I know I had a hard time trying to understand myself in this process, and I’m sure the members did as well,” he says.

Vernon considers every question carefully before answering, weighing his words. Which is why it’s so much more meaningful when he expresses the reality of stardom’s occasionally choreographed nature: “Actually, being restricted of free speech in a way, it does kind of block our process of trying to understand ourselves, so I guess that was the hardest part.”

Nearly all the members of the group must complete their 18-month-minimum military service in the coming years. The exceptions are Joshua (a U.S. citizen), The 8 and Jun (Chinese citizens), and S.Coups, exempt because of an ACL injury. “We are doing our best to adapt to it,” DK says of the changing dynamics as members begin to enlist. Adds Hoshi: “This is something that has been inevitable for us all along. We have been prepared. We have a lot of projects that we have discussed with the company very thoroughly up until now.”

Woozi and S.Coups are optimistic about the group’s future. “We understand that the fans are very sad that some of us are going to be away, but among ourselves, [we] don’t consider this to be a really huge deal because we know that we are going to stay together,” Woozi says. “We should consider this as quite a long preparation phase for the next album that’s going to be even better and greater.”

But, on the flip side, says S.Coups, “I think this can be a great opportunity for the members who are still remaining; [they] can stick together and make something great to showcase to the fans. It can also be a great time for members who have been mentally or physically exhausted to recharge themselves.”

Seventeen seemingly thrives under high-stress conditions in part because of their focus on mental and physical health. When this subject is broached, S.Coups, Dino and Joshua excitedly point to their bandmate The 8 as their expert of wellness. “I do a lot of rehabilitation. I hit the gym very often [and] receive personal training,” says The 8. “For my mental health, I do a lot of meditation, and each member has their own way of relieving stress,” adds the 27-year-old.

“On my off days, I try to not think about work at all and just stay at home and relax,” DK explains of his routine.

Adds Joshua: “We also have a lot of hobbies that we try to find to recharge. Mentally, we also do counseling, too, to help us out,” noting that the bandmates have always been given the resources to consult a professional when they’re having a hard time.

When asked how Pledis can ensure the safety and sanity of young performers, Han says the company has consistently offered aid to its artists when they need it. “We are committed to supporting our artists so they can grow into healthy, well-rounded individuals, both physically and emotionally,” he notes, adding that Hybe operates in-house clinics for all artists and trainees.

While Western music markets still haven’t fully figured out how K-pop acts fit into the overall landscape — which leads to groups like Seventeen arguably not getting the same recognition as other acts with similarly stratospheric sales and impact — the band remains unfazed. “We try not to dwell on those things because [the] people who would recognize us [will] recognize us at some point. At the end of the day, all we have to do is just try our best,” Woozi says. “What we’re trying to do is just tell our own personal story for the people who are listening and the people who love us.”

The reflective Vernon echoes that sentiment. “Honestly, I don’t really care if everyone understands it or not because we’re just happy and extremely grateful to be where we are right now,” he says.

Adds Woozi: “Rather than arguing with people who don’t like us and asking why they’re not liking us, I think we should just focus on our thing and run our own race. People have their own preferences and their own taste, and you just have to leave it up to them. There’s no reason asking them why they like a certain person — that’s too immature.”