aespa

aespa — Karina, Winter, Giselle and Ningning — debuted under SM Entertainment in November 2020 as the first K-pop group with virtual members built into its DNA: each singer is paired with an AI avatar counterpart, an “æ,” and the group’s name fuses “avatar experience” with “aspect.” Hits like “Black Mamba,” “Next Level” and “Supernova” made them one of the biggest girl groups of their generation.

A band designed for the metaverse

The group’s lore unfolds in SM’s virtual world Kwangya, guided by an AI being called nævis, where the members battle and befriend their digital doubles. The æ avatars have appeared in music videos and on stage alongside the human members — a concept SM founder Lee Soo-man pitched as the future of entertainment, and one that debuted conveniently mid-pandemic. As Giselle told Rolling Stone in an October 2023 joint interview with Grimes, “We started with the metaverse thing because we debuted during Covid, then went on to doing more live performances. We felt very cyber.”

In that conversation Karina explained the concept’s point — the members engage with their avatars, sometimes as friends, sometimes as antagonists — while Giselle reacted to Grimes’s open-source AI voice project with enthusiasm: “That’s so cool. You’re helping people.” The members have also pushed back on being reduced to the gimmick, stressing that they are performers, not products of the technology.

Critics of the concept see a major label using virtual doubles to squeeze more content from — and perhaps one day replace — human idols, a live anxiety in an industry already experimenting with fully virtual groups. aespa themselves have skirted that debate; their stance is embodied rather than argued, performing alongside AI versions of themselves for a fandom that largely embraces the fiction.