Who Is the Leader of NewJeans?

NewJeans has been an incredibly successful K-pop group basically since the start, with even their debut album surpassing 1 million units sold, a feat that had not been achieved in South Korea for 26 years at the time. As such, the group is always amassing more fans that want to learn about the group. Since many K-pop labels assign specific roles or “positions” to individual members of a K-pop group, new fans often wonder who the leader of NewJeans is — so here’s the very cool answer.

NewJeans Has No Leader Because There Are No Assigned Positions

Yep. There is no leader of NewJeans, nor are there any assigned roles or positions. Having no group leader isn’t especially common in K-pop, but it’s not extremely rare either. Blackpink, for example, has no leader, nor does KARD. However, having no assigned positions at all is rarer. The reason why NewJeans has no positions has to do with their label, ADOR, which exists independently under HYBE, the home of BTS.

The CEO of ADOR who created NewJeans is Min Hee-jin, who felt that K-pop had become constrained by certain formulas of presentation and style. As such, she had become “a bit rebellious” and “wanted to break that formula” with NewJeans. Forgoing a leader and positions was one part of breaking that formula. Another part was to debut NewJeans without any dramatic build-up and to film music videos for each song on the debut album. And obviously, yet another part was the style of the music and the videos themselves, with an effortlessly cool retro vibe.

So, ultimately, the answer to who the leader of NewJeans is is that there is no leader. However, fans sometimes like to imagine one of the five girls as the leader anyway, just based off of who typically takes the lead to answer interview questions or support other members. Some people particularly like to imagine Minji as the leader, for her leadership qualities and because she is the oldest member of the group. Others appreciate how Hanni and Danielle tend to take the lead in English-language interviews. But none of that is official. Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin, and Hyein are all equals with no official positions in NewJeans.

For more info about the group, check out where all of the NewJeans members are originally from.