“Unlucky Girl Group” ILLIT Faces Numerous Controversies After 1 Month Of Debut

HYBE’s new girl group ILLIT made their debut with the title song “Magnetic” on March 25th and immediately swept all the music charts. They even achieved Perfect All-Kill and entered Billboard Hot 100 within the first month of their debut. Especially, ILLIT even broke the debut record of NewJeans and BLACKPINK. Amid the heat of ILLIT’s debut, Belift Lab released a music video for the b-side track “Lucky Girl Syndrome”.

With a simple concept of energetic city girls, ILLIT members become the ”luckiest girls” with a bright and lovely image. However, the girl group faced a lot of problems during the promotion of the song. Unlike “Magnetic”, “Lucky Girl Syndrome” failed to rise on the charts and was completely forgotten due to HYBE’s internal conflict.

On April 22nd, HYBE initiated a dispute with ADOR’s CEO Min Hee-jin, claiming that she attempted to take over the management rights of the label. Min Hee-jin responded by accusing HYBE and Bang Si-hyuk of copying NewJeans’s concept to create ILLIT. 

Since then, ILLIT has been called “copy of NewJeans”. Previously, ILLIT already caused a stir because of their resemblances to NewJeans, from the group formation to their age and the refreshing concept. Many netizens agreed with Min Hee-jin’s remarks and they even created videos comparing ILLIT and NewJeans. In particular, many parts of “Lucky Girl Syndrome” choreography were pointed out to be exactly the same as NewJeans’s dances. 

Singing “Lucky Girl Syndrome”, ILLIT ended up becoming the most unlucky girl group. Despite making their debut in a big company with good songs, pretty visuals and well-planned promotion, the girl group suddenly got involved in intense controversies within their own company.

In addition, “Lucky Girl Syndrome” was embroiled in plagiarism suspicions. Some people found out that several parts of the song’s melody were taken from The Wreck’s “Favorite Liar”. Although fans tried to defend their idols with excuses such as using the same sample, the issue once again affected the group’s image negatively.

Another problem that ILLIT is facing is their singing abilities. Prior to all the internal conflicts within HYBE, the members were harshly criticized for their poor live singing skills during encore stages on music shows.

Despite having been active for only one month, ILLIT has already struggled with numerous issues, causing regrets from fans. Even after achieving many remarkable results, the public has already forgotten them all due to HYBE’s scandals.

Source: K14