By Hasan Beyaz
Formed through Mnet's survival competition Girls Planet 999 and debuting in January 2022, Kep1er have spent four years becoming one of K-pop's most consistent acts. The six-member group – Choi Yujin, Xiaoting, Kim Chaehyun, Kim Dayeon, Hikaru, and Huening Bahiyyih – have released seven mini albums, toured across Asia, performed on festival stages around the world, and accumulated over two million combined album sales. Eight releases in, they show no signs of standing still.
Their eighth mini album, CRACK CODE, released in March 2026, marks a deliberate shift. Darker and more confrontational than anything in their back catalogue, it centres on the title track "KILLA (Face the Other Me)" – an electronic hip-hop record built around the idea of confronting a hidden, more powerful version of yourself. Where earlier iterations of Kep1er have leaned bright and kinetic, CRACK CODE strips the palette back: cooler tones, sharper edges, an image that carries weight rather than colour. The change isn't cosmetic. It reflects a group that has been doing this long enough to know what they haven't shown yet – and confident enough to show it.
Across its five tracks, the album moves between the fierce collective momentum of "I Am Kep1" and the more dramatic, pop-punch of "Addicted 2 Ya," with the members describing the full listen as something that could only exist at this point in their career. Growth, for Kep1er, has never been a sudden thing. It has arrived through four years of live stages, feedback, and the particular kind of understanding that comes from spending more time with six people than with anyone else.
That accumulation is what CRACK CODE sounds like. The concept of breaking open to find something truer underneath isn't just a visual frame – the members describe the making of the album as a process of genuine discovery, working through unfamiliar vocal territory, new performance styles, and challenges that required more practice and research than anything before. For Chaehyun, the clearest sign of progress was felt between the members themselves. "Now it feels like we're in sync even without trying," she says, "and that's when I felt like we had cracked the code together."
It's a fitting way to describe a group at this particular moment: not reinventing themselves, but revealing a layer that was always there. CRACK CODE is the sound of Kep1er trusting what four years have made them.
We sat down with the group to talk about the album, the art of reinvention, and what it means to finally feel in sync.
