aespa에스파

aespa (에스파), usually written in lower case, is a South Korean girl group formed by SM Entertainment. Its four members are Karina (카리나), the leader, Giselle (지젤), Winter (윈터) and Ningning (닝닝). The group debuted on November 17, 2020, with the single "Black Mamba", whose music video set a record for the most views in 24 hours for a K-pop group's debut video, at 21.4 million. Their first EP, Savage (2021), entered the US Billboard 200 albums chart at number 20.¹⁴

Their second EP, Girls (2022), sold 1,426,487 copies in its first week on the Circle Chart, South Korea's official chart, the first time a girl group had passed a million in an album's first week.² It also reached number 3 on the Billboard 200, still their highest peak there.⁴ By the release of their first full album, Armageddon, in 2024, aespa had become the first female artist in the history of the Hanteo Chart, which counts album sales in real time, to sell more than a million copies of four different albums in their first week.³

"Supernova", the lead single of Armageddon, was their first song to top the Circle Digital Chart, where it stayed for eleven weeks.¹ At the 2024 Melon Music Awards, aespa won three of the four daesang (대상), the grand prizes at the top of a Korean awards show: Artist, Album (Armageddon) and Song of the Year. They had won the fourth, Record of the Year, in 2021, about a year after their debut, as DabPop's Melon Music Awards archive records.⁵ "Supernova" also won Song of the Year at the 2024 MAMA Awards, listed in the MAMA Awards archive.⁶

Their first concert tour, Synk: Hyper Line, opened at Seoul's Jamsil Arena in February 2023. Its ten Japanese shows drew 110,000 spectators, and that August aespa played two nights at the Tokyo Dome, the first "fourth generation" K-pop act to hold a solo concert there.¹ Two members appear in DabPop's list of K-pop idols who are luxury brand ambassadors: Karina for Prada (2024) and Ningning for Versace (2024) and Gucci (2026).⁷