In April, ENHYPEN played Coachella with a set spanning the combative (“Future Perfect (Pass The MIC)”) to the ethereal (“Moonstruck”). Fan favourites like “ParadoXXX Invasion” and “Blockbuster” were rearranged into even chunkier beasts, the live band cranking up the tension. “Drunk-Dazed” became a pounding rave. The audience swelled for their second weekend, and amid the dust and whipping winds, Jungwon, Heeseung, Jay, Sunghoon, Jake, Sunoo and Ni-ki, whose records now regularly sell over a million copies, delivered an unspoken yet clear-cut message: ENHYPEN are ready for superstardom. 

Three days before this interview, Jay went live on the social platform Weverse. Self-aware and erudite, the 23-year-old sat in a small practice room, his beloved guitars behind him, and told Engenes (ENHYPEN’s fandom) that he believed 2025 and their new EP, DESIRE : UNLEASH, to be the most important of their career. 

The tipping point Jay’s referring to feels very real. Now in their fifth year, with an acclaimed Coachella set under their belts, a growing awards list, a US tour (their fourth) scheduled for August followed by European arena dates (their first), and their sixth EP in hand, their ambitions are palpable. “We're going to be trying a lot of new things, performance-wise,” Jay tells Dazed over Zoom. “We’re showcasing a never-before-seen face of ENHYPEN.”

Prior to the EP’s release, there were glimpses of this new ENHYPEN via four conceptual shoots (MAKE, YOU, MINE, and ENGENE) and a concept cinema video that teased the record’s exploration of desire and ruin set within the band’s ongoing vampiric lore. Mentioning MAKE elicits little snorts of laughter from Jake, Jay, and the band’s leader, Jungwon. “I definitely thought it was very daring but it tied in very well with the overarching concept,” says Jay, with no pun intended. “It brought something new to the table.” 

They’re aware that the fandom lost their collective minds upon seeing the members in leather shackles and shibari, their skin sprouting thorns and branded with phrases like ‘Monster In Me’ and Make Mine’, a knife being licked, a hacksaw, mace, and chainsaw in hand. They saw the responses, from thirsty to surreal, on social media. “I did look at a lot of fan edits and one of them included me pulling a cow, which was very memorable,” says Jungwon, who, amused, ended up personally responding to the said bovine edit.

But, humour aside, DESIRE : UNLEASH is, Jake says, “where we talk about loving someone but also wanting to destroy them. Ever since our debut EP, we’ve talked about two opposite but connected things, and the times in life where you come across making a choice [between them]. When there’s good on one side, there’s bad [on the other], there’s evil and there’s happiness, and the topic of desire always changes when we put out an album. [This EP] might be a bit extreme, like, no one's gonna have the kind of desires that we talk about,” he says with a laugh. “But it puts it at a level where it’s more interesting or appealing to listeners. And I think people can relate to it in a way. Everyone has desires within, and everyone goes through a time where they have to fight them.”  

ENHYPEN’s overarching lore has always been most fascinating when you flip the vampiric story (trying not to fight the darkness, taming the desire for blood, and experiencing human love and loss, in a nutshell) and view it through the lens of fame: transitioning from the norm to an idol, decadence and temptation, the loss of control and battle to regain it, and the cost of an ever-present hunger for more. 

You might wonder if such a consuming and ever-expanding narrative has shaped, or in fact been reflective of, the band’s growing understanding of themselves as people and idols. But, explains Jungwon, this has come entirely independent of the world-building encircling them. “Our lore and us as artists are two separate things. When we’re onstage, we’re not focused on trying to explain our lore, we’re not consciously thinking of the Dark Moon universe, we’re performers and we just want to pull off that performance in the best way possible. The same goes for when we’re in the studio. The lore is an added excitement for the fans to have more fun with, and when we’re on stage we just focus on what we need to do best.” 

ENHYPEN will always be the first to admit they’re still learning and refining their craft. After wrapping up Coachella, Heeseung described their set as “perfect”, which he’s now a little sheepish about. “Looking back, me saying that it was perfect was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing because I was really hyped up,” he laughs. “There are definitely some things we could have done better, but it was the most gratifying stage I’ve done in my career. Coachella is going to be a new benchmark for us in putting together more impressive stages, not just for me but the entire group.”

Some days and some sessions are easier than others. Take “Flashover”, the new EP’s future bass banger, which was super straightforward to embody, says Sunoo: “It blew me away when I first heard it. It’s really intense and it left a very strong impression as the first track.” 

Whereas the lead single “Bad Desire (With or Without You)” presented a conundrum for Sunghoon: “It was a little tricky to wrap my head around in terms of its substance and, in many ways, I was a bit stuck on how I should go about this song.” Getting unstuck was a case of “just singing it again and again,” he adds, as his bandmates laugh. “We tried a lot of different things, like adjusting the key and so forth and over the course of that, it came to me.”

One of the most in-demand groups in the business, last year alone they released their second studio album, ROMANCE : UNTOLD, its repackage (ROMANCE : UNTOLD - daydream -), an EP (Memorabilia), toured seven countries for five months with two different productions, attended a Prada show (for whom they’re ambassadors) in Milan, filmed their own YouTube variety show and countless brand and media shoots. Unable to spend weeks testing and tweaking material in the studio, they’ve instead developed the ability to adapt and adopt, and be damn fast at it.

“These days we get recording done pretty quickly,” says Sunghoon. 

Adds Jungwon: “For this particular title track, it really took a short amount of time. We only recorded two or three times, I think.”

So, hypothetically, ENHYPEN’s superpower at this point could be to knock out, say, a two-disc mega concept album in a day? 

“One [working] day is too much of a stretch. We’d take more than that,” says Sunoo, half-smiling, half in the realm of ‘aw hell, no’ .

Heeseung laughs: “Maybe if they caged us up and all we did for 24 hours straight was record? Maybe.”

There is an inherent genrelessness to K-pop, with albums running the entire gamut of popular music where synth-pop can sit next to a soft, treacly ballad, next to a smoky R&B jam. Done without care, it floats adrift on an identity crisis. ENHYPEN’s circumvented that risk with an infrastructure on their EPs – an experimental intro, a decadent lead single and an equally extravagant, so-good-it-could-be-lead-single track, a mid-tempo singalong, a curveball, and a definitive closer – which guides the listener from record to record and, for the band, creates a stable platform from which they can build out and play with sound. 

DESIRE : UNLEASH is no exception to this design – “Each track is distinctive, each song has a different meaning and reason for why it’s there, which makes it even more exciting when we’re in the booth, so I hope you’ll savour how they’re one of a kind,” says Heeseung – even as it makes no bones about being their most grown-up record. Eight tracks over 17 minutes is short but in this time it’s dominant, pleading, lovesick, besotted, tormented, and unabashedly horny. 

We’ve never done a real hip hop song. It might lead to a bigger spectrum of music for us, I think this is a starting point.

– Jake, ENHYPEN

During a recent US interview, Jay described the EP as “shocking”. On the shuddering “Bad Desire (With or Without You)”, melancholia entwines with basic instinct (‘A heaven without you must be like hell… a hell where I embrace you must be like heaven… Tell me all your deepest, all your bad desires’). “Too Close” softens its voracious appetite – ’All the cravings I kept down, it feels like they’re awakening’ – with jazzy lounge piano, while the lyrics for “Outside” run thus: ‘Was a pretty boy but it’s getting ugly, The sounds of my desire hit me, like they’re breaking my head, No virtue signaling, just wanna have you, Angels and demons up all night’. Jungwon grins: “I think fans will be able to understand where Jay is coming from.” 

Let's pause on “Outside” for a moment. Sampling Three 6 Mafia’s “Stay Fly”, it’s their first concerted foray into hip hop, a genre minimally explored by previous tracks “Blockbuster”, “Future Perfect (Pass The MIC)” and “Daydream”. ENHYPEN – who are somewhat sleepy because it’s morning and they’re in the thick of the hectic final dash to release day – perk up. Jake, fuelled on iced cornsilk tea and snacks, describes “Outside” as ’interesting and charismatic’. “We’ve never done something like this before, a real hip hop song,” he explains. “We have a session where we all listen to the songs, we talk about what we want to put on the album and as soon as we heard this, we knew it suited the whole colour of this album. It might lead to a bigger spectrum of music for us, and I think this is a starting point.”

Ownership of their work increasingly stretches beyond being merely performers. Previously, Ni-ki has contributed choreography, all the band has penned lyrics, and Heeseung co-wrote and co-produced “Highway 1009” for their last album. On DESIRE : UNLEASH, it’s Jay’s debut as a songwriter/producer, teaming up with FRANTS who worked on last year’s countrified EDM banger, “Teeth” (unarguably one of their finest deep cuts). Jay’s “Helium” shares its galloping, urgent cadence but leans in one of his great loves – rock music – with guitar (which he, too, played) squalling across its back half, tag-teaming with Heeseung’s soaring ad-libs.

“FRANTS is a person I feel very comfortable around so we’ve been working on a few songs together,” says Jay, who adds that his starting point is simple “curiosity” around a certain sound and “my desire to have more of those [types of] songs. “When I thought about helium I thought not about lightness but how a balloon full of helium will fly really high into the atmosphere, and I decided to liken that to a person’s love towards me, which really lifts me up to that high place.”

No ENHYPEN record would be complete without the inclusion of their numerous lyrical and visual motifs – the moon, monsters, fate, blood, binding, and lines, to name but a few – offering a meticulous, satisfying exercise in connecting the dots past and present. “We’ve been working on this lore since debut and I’m fascinated by finding tiny things that tie in with our older concepts and overarching themes. A lot of attention goes into our videos and album props, the little pieces here and there that allow Engene to make their own interpretations and enjoy it in every way,” says Ni-ki, flagging, as an example, his custom fang grillz in their new video, where he bites his second self in a scene reminiscent of a previous ENHYPEN choreography. “I’m impressed how our [record] company doesn't try to keep us in a comfort zone but stretches the theme in different ways.”

But, as is the way with any new release, ENHYPEN find themselves facing that wily, unpredictable path towards the future. And with a title like DESIRE : UNLEASH, there’s only one thing left to ask… What is it they desire next? 

“I definitely have desires for ENHYPEN to reach new heights, and my personal dreams into which I try to channel positive energy so all this can be a stepping stone for a big leap forward,” says Sunghoon. He ponders the contents of those dreams under his breath for a long moment, then laughs at himself for overthinking his reply. “I’m talking about me becoming a better person who goes further as a human being.”

“I try not to read into it too much, I just want to be a cooler artist with a lot of energy and potential, and to create more music packed with emotions that a wider audience can relate to,” adds Heeseung. 

As for Jake, the soft-spoken, Australia-raised member of the group, he offers up a wide, easy-going grin. “Desire doesn't have to be extreme, so mine would be just meeting our fans all over the world more often, and having a really, really great time.”

DESIRE : UNLEASH is out today (June 5)