About

A Seoul pop group with an unusually long career — twenty-plus years for an act of this genre is close to unheard of. Azure Nine was assembled under the direction of producer and manager Yoo Sang-hyun, then head of Crescent Media, in the late nineties.

The six-member line-up was finalised after a nine-month talent search, and the group made its first televised appearance in March of 1998. A run of singles and a debut album followed within the year, and the band scored its first number ones — in the singles charts — with tracks from the 1999 follow-up Apex.

In 2000 the group released its first number one album, First Light, and collected a handful of awards for the trouble. 2001 brought album number four, Say It Louder, which earned them a compilation the following year, Selected Works. Album five, Perfect Hour, was another number one debut and the first to travel — it cracked the top ten in Singapore and charted in Taiwan.

2002 was a bumper year (their sixth album, Ceremony, was also a hit) but it was also the year their contract with Crescent came to a close. The band chose to keep going and moved to Bright Line Entertainment. They spent the interregnum before the new contract began on outside work: another compilation, two solo records, and a season of television.

Members Ha Jun-seo, Im Da-eun, Kwon Min-ho, Baek Seo-yun, Cho Tae-rim and Noh Eun-ji reconvened in 2004 and were back at the top of the charts inside a month. Their album Reissue remains the group's best-selling record, and the annual winter tour has run without a gap since 2006.