Somi
전소미- Born
- 9 March 2001
Won Produce 101 as a JYP trainee and co-wrote her solo debut single.
Their story
The winner who waited
Jeon Somi was a JYP trainee who had already been on one survival show, Sixteen, when she won the viewer vote on Produce 101 in 2016. I.O.I lasted a year. After that she stayed at JYP without a debut until the summer of 2018, when she left the company, and that autumn she signed with The Black Label, the YG sub-label run by the producer Teddy.
Teddy's pop
Her first single album, Birthday, came out in June 2019. The title track is loud hip-hop dance pop that she co-composed with Teddy, while the B-side "Outta My Head" is slower R&B whose music and lyrics she worked on herself. A year later Interscope signed her, and "What You Waiting For" gave her a first music show trophy. "Dumb Dumb" in 2021 was the breakthrough at home, her first solo song in the Korean top ten, followed by her first studio album, XOXO.
From Fast Forward to Closer
"Fast Forward", from the EP Game Plan, became her first top-five hit in Korea. "Closer" in 2025 built its chorus on the melody of Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls", a choice one Seoulbeats review called a stylish but hollow remix. On Chaotic & Confused she had a hand in writing "Escapade" and "Delu".
Where she is now
In 2026 she went back to where it started: nine members of I.O.I returned for the group's tenth anniversary, and Somi wrote "IOI (Where My Girls At)" for the reunion album, ten years after the vote that first made her famous. Her solo career is still with The Black Label, where Teddy launched it.