In a dance studio in deep West London, at the end of a coidor past a woman staging a solo tap number and a room full of people in harem pants moving slowly to shamanic music, is a room with five young men inside, all wearing either black or grey sweatpants. They really want to be Britain‘s next great boyband. Many have come before them—some successful, most not—but they have something in their arsenal they hope sets them apart: dearALICE is the first British outfit to have been put through the famously tough but often fruitful K-Pop system.
The five boys––James Sharp, Dexter Greenwood, Reese Carter, Olly Quinn, and Blaise Noon––have known each other for just 15 months, plucked from different corners of the country and sent on a flight to Seoul. There, a combination of three major entertainment companies got to work assembling a team to, in theory, make this whole exercise foolproof: gamma., the new tech and media company formed by Larry Jackson (who signed Lana Del Rey and once managed Kanye West) and Ike Youssef; Moon&Back Media, a British television company; and SM Entertainment, the Korean juggernaut responsible for breaking bands like Aespa and NCT 127.
Compared to other idols who spend years in K-Pop training, the three months the boys spent in Seoul is a fast-track course, but they had been fine-tuning things for far longer before making their proper debut last month.
On this Wednesday night in late February, they’re rehearsing for a performance of their debut track, “Ariana,” at a regional gay awards show––the kind of thing you take to crack new audiences. It’s been about a fortnight since they last did this routine, but it doesn’t really show. Even in, let’s say, 70% intensity (there’s no audience, after all), there’s this almost disconcerting slickness to how their bodies unfold and slot back together in unison. A big part of K-Pop live performance is what’s known as ‘formation.’ While Western groups might bust out moves in a straight line, K-Pop choreo swirls like stirred soup, with members constantly swapping places as they do sharp, hard-to-replicate routines.
They do it once, then again, then again, with recoveries in between. How have they kept in shape since they last did this choreo? “Praying,” says Reese, the rebellious lone buzz-cut in a troupe of floppy and curly-haired bandmates, out of breath.
There are still some issues to tease out, they discover: the stage they’ll perform on is smaller than they’re used to, and with all of this movement, there’s a strong likelihood someone will either fall backward or forward off of the stage. Their day-to-day manager, a fun young English woman from Moon&Back, is tracking down the band’s new music video on her phone, while their social media manager, who came from SM via California solely to work with dearALICE, is figuring out something else. Shigeto Nakano, who choreographed this routine, isn’t in the room to troubleshoot, so they’re left to do equations, judging where they might have to stand in order for everything to be precise. Reese looks at me again. “My maths is shite,” he says.
Time’s up. After filming some social content in the studio, we walk to a nearby Nando’s for a chat and a late dinner. Out of curiosity, James orders the Fanta chicken. Blaise, the half-Belgian baby of the group, known for showing off his ‘Blaise-ceps,’ leans over to smell it then turns back to me, wrinkling his nose.
Before we meet, in conversations with friends or around the office, I keep accidentally calling them Still Alice—until I remember that’s the name of the indie movie about Julianne Moore having early-onset dementia. Their actual name, dearALICE, was lifted from a restaurant they went to in Itaewon, the Soho of Seoul. ALICE is an acronym: “A Love I Can’t Explain”.
“I never thought I’d be in a boyband. I always thought the concept was cringey”
james sharp
They first met in November 2023. Each member had been DMed on Instagram, asking to submit a tape for a casting for a new boyband that would train K-pop style in Seoul, and then invited to an in-person audition. Save for James (floppy-haired, handsome, quiet, the eldest), who has a big TikTok following with his twin brother Lewis, they were all doing normal, theatre-kid-adjacent things. Some were cruise ship dancers or still in performing arts school. Others were working part time in betting shops, trying to figure out if something like this might happen to them one day. Olly, the curly-mulleted one from Sunderland with great skin, skipped an audition for The Book of Mormon in London’s West End to do this instead.
“I never thought I’d be in a boyband,” James says. “I always thought the concept was cringey. The dancing element drew me in.”
A few of them even had doubts about going, given the slightly strange nature of the casting call. “We didn’t know if it was real,” Reese says.
This wasn’t the first time Korean-style pop training had been applied beyond its borders. Fans of the genre will have watched the formation of international group Katseye by Hybe (BTS) and Universal Music Group on 2023’s Dream Academy, followed by a Netflix documentary the year after. That band—with members from four different countries— touted as a “global girl group,” whereas dearALICE is solely British, harbouring a bit of that One Direction sauce that has historically made crowds of mostly teenage girls go wild.
“In many ways dearALICE is a story of firsts,” Whitney Asomani, gamma.’s Vice President of Marketing tells me. “The concept of an intensive pre-debut development phase, where artists train in vocals, dance, performance, and media for years before release, isn’t something that’s been common practice for a while.” For that reason, they believe there’s little competition for these boys. “Success is there for the taking,” Asomani adds, “but it’s going to take a lot of work.”
dearALICE’s journey’ was documented by a camera crew for a BBC reality show called Made in Korea. The cameras were constantly on, they say. About 100 hours of footage would be boiled down into a 45-minute episode.
Throughout their training, they’re regularly put in front of Hee Jun Yoon, the director of SM Entertainment’s Artist Development Centre, for what soon starts to feel like a twisted humiliation ritual.
“It was really brutal because there was no escape to find yourself,” Reese says. “You just had to be raw in the places you didn’t think you had the space to be emotionally raw.”
The boys snigger at “raw.”
“Don’t acknowledge it,” Blaise says.
“We were changed as people out there,” Dexter, the group’s smiley, very affable one says.
“Yeah we’re completely different people now,” James says. “Even watching it can be difficult because we’ve changed so much?.”
They put you through it, I say, and with barely a pause, Olly replies: “Pressure makes diamonds.”
While in Seoul, they made a trio of songs that are still on their Spotify but probably shouldn’t be: badly microwaved BTS nachos by way of High School Musical, that are catchy in a sort of insidious Baby Shark way. They have names like “Vibes” (the chorus: “Can you feel the vibes?!”) and “Life is a Movie.” I can’t imagine many of them think those songs, which feel plain and void of personality, are indicative of their talents The new single, “Ariana,” is much better.
It’s a compelling concept for a Gen-Z pop song: falling for a girl who won’t pay attention to you because she’s too busy obsessing over a celebrity online. It’s accompanied by the kind of grandiose, apocalyptic pop production that made the Skrillex-touched Purpose era of Justin Bieber’s career so significant.
The song debuted at SM Town in Seoul in January, a live concert featuring SM’s artists. “That was a real reality check. Like OK, we’re doing this,” James says. “Especially the fact we did it two nights in a row.”
They played to 50,000 people in that arena.
“That’s in person as well,” Blaise chimes in. “Online, there’s more watching.”
That’s what they’re conscious of: “The ones at home can see the fuck-ups,” Reese says. “Up close and personal.”
“If you deep that there’s that many watching online, it’s a scary thing,” Blaise adds. He blocks them out: “Stress management.”
They even got a video message of support from its titular subject: Ariana Grande. How did that happen? “We’re lucky that the team we have around us are well-connected,” Dexter says.
Olly says they “were hoping to meet her,” but there was a scheduling issue.
Being propelled into the big leagues by your team means the band have sidled up to stars on SM’s roster too—like Aespa, just last weekend. Their well-connectedness also means they’ve landed on platforms most spend years building up to, like musical guest spots on Strictly Come Dancing and kids’ TV, singing those old songs that feel a little wince-worthy.
“We all live in the same block, but we’re far enough away so we don’t smell each other”
reese carter
The down side, in some ways, is that they’re still learning about their sound as people get to know them. I ask what’s coming next and there’s a sense that there’s no straight answer to that.
It all seems a little like building a plane in mid-air. There are few things that feel really definitive, bar the fact that they are fundamentally not a K-pop group. “We’re members of a British boy band who started in the K-pop process,” Blaise says.
“We also don’t sing in Korean,” James adds.
“And we’re not Korean,” Olly says.
For the most part, like many of those groups, they don’t seem to be under the thumb of anyone. Today, they all live independently, in different apartments in the same building in west London. “We’re all in the same block, but we’re far enough away so we don’t smell each other,” Reese says. Dexter chimes in: “Or argue about the dishes.”
Sure, there’s probably some light scoldings for minor fuck-ups (Reese accidentally leaked the drop date of the “Ariana” video), and I imagine they probably need to ask permission before getting new haircuts. But they all seem relatively loose. I’d expected five emotionally-neutered, unbearably polite young men all scared of saying the wrong thing. Instead, they seem grateful, grounded, and hungry to be something.
It also feels like they come at a time when people don’t give a shit about how bands come together anyway, so long as the music interests them. In pop, we flit between the high gloss of BLACKPINK and the anthemic candour of someone Chappell Roan—between slick, perfected performance and a more unpredictable, from-the-heart energy. Maybe there’s an in-between world that dearALICE will occupy. Right now, they’re singing songs written by other people and performing choreography by masters of their craft, instead of demonstrating a more DIY culture. But is that what we want from K-Pop-style music anyway?
“We were brought together in a manufactured way, but everything since has been real,” Dexter says of those thrown-around allegations. “We’ve found the right ingredients. We can do it our way.”
And with a wink, Reese jokes: “I think we got away with it!”
