Wish
곽다윗- Name
- Kwak Da-wit
- Born
- 11 June 2002
The oldest member; co-created the choreography for "Better Days" on Youth: Epilogue.
Their story
Eight trainees, eight peaks
EPEX started as C9 Rookies, a working name for eight trainees at C9 Entertainment, the home of CIX. The final name is short for "Eight Apex", each member reaching his own peak. Keum was the familiar face, having come close to the final line-up of Produce X 101. The debut EP Bipolar Pt.1: Prelude of Anxiety arrived in June 2021, with "Lock Down" as its title track.
Albums told in series
From the start EPEX worked in chapters. The Bipolar EPs split into a line about anxiety and a line about love, and the titles kept that split until 2023. Baekseung said the debut songs came out of the members' real conversations. Then came the Youth trilogy, three studio albums in little more than a year, from "Youth2Youth" to "Grateful to Tears". A-Min has said the group wants to keep making series with connected stories.
Hip-hop roots, softer edges
The early records leaned on hip-hop, though the members call themselves a dance group, and they mixed in trap, Latin and R&B. Later singles turned warmer: "Do 4 Me" was funky, "Sunshower" a groovy song about a first break-up. Fans know them for tight choreography, and the press calls them a "performance hotspot". In May 2025 they played Fuzhou, in what was reported as the first K-pop concert in mainland China since 2016.
Where they are now
Keum, who had been on a break since the spring, left when his contract with C9 ended in November 2025. The other seven came back in June 2026 after their longest gap yet with Youth: Epilogue, the end of the Youth story. Jeff, Baekseung and Ayden wrote the lyrics of the title track "ECHO", Wish and A-Min worked on choreography, and Yewang directed the recordings.
