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“Great! I’ll find you after.”

And with that, she stood up and waved before seamlessly joining the members and crew by the curtains leading out onto the stage.

I sat in the green room with the rest of the media team to watch the show on the wall-mounted TV.

Harlow Harris had the kind of ease that came from being used to an audience, and while I’d never really sat down to watch any of her shows, it was clear she respected the group as fellow artists, and not just famous guests brought in for ratings, which was sometimes how these shows went.

I grabbed myself a drink and settled on the sofa to watch.

“Our guests today come all the way from Korea, and they’re currently taking time out of their massive world tour to join us. They’re one of the biggest groups in the world right now. They’ve sold out stadiums, broken chart records and have a reputation for being some of the nicest guys in the industry. Everyone, please give it up for GVibes!”

We could hear the screaming through the walls. They could probably hear it down the street.

The group walked on stage smiling and waving. Ace threw finger hearts at the audience, Lee stopped for a dance break before Woojin tossed an arm around his neck and dragged him over to the sofa. Jihoon waved and smiled, walking with Minjae. They joined Harlow in the seating area, arranging themselves on the big sofa while she sat across from them, waiting for the audience to calm down enough to speak.

“Wow. Well, as you can probably tell, we’ve assembled a few of your Vibers in the audience with us today. Does it ever get old – walking into a room and having people scream at you?”

The members laughed, and I laughed along with them, watching as Harlow put them at ease in a way that didn’t always happen in interviews. Sometimes, the hosts liked to make a spectacle of their ‘otherness’ – whether that was because of their star power, or because they were Korean. But not Harlow. She spoke to them like colleagues.

“I was at your concert a couple days ago, and boy, Vibers are loud! Does it ever get normal? Going out onto a stage and having thousands of people singing along to your songs?”

Jae picked up his mic to speak. “I don’t think it ever becomes ‘normal’. It still surprises us. We get used to performing, learning songs and dances, but hearing people sing our songs back to us still feels strange, especially if they’re learning the Korean lyrics.”

Lee nodded and raised his own mic. “Sometimes, I get nervous. Sometimes, we go out on stage, and I wonder if this will be the time no one sings. Maybe today Vibers will be quiet. Never.” He grinned at the audience, who obligingly screamed.

Ace took the mic from Lee and responded, almost shyly. “Sometimes, they sing so loud I forget my part because I took out my earpiece to listen to them.”

The group laughed while the audience made ‘aww’ noises, and I grinned, because I had seen him do that multiple times, although I’d never once seen him miss a cue.

Harlow joked along with them for a while before steering the conversation back to something more structured.

“I’ve seen some of your rehearsals from the backstage documentary you’re filming, and one thing I’ve been really impressed by is the precision of your dancing. Now, everyone here knows I am not a dancer–” she turned to the audience, who gamely shared in the laugh, because while Harlow Harris was a phenomenal performer, her dance moves were mostly based on vibes. “How do you manage to do all that on stage – keep the emotions of the songs alive – while the choreo is so demanding?”

Jihoon took the mic and said, “We always want our audience to be able to feel our performance, our intention, and if we concentrate only on our steps, the audience might feel that, instead of our emotions. We practice very, very hard until it becomes natural. Our body remembers the way we move, so we can focus on making the crowd feel the song. That’s more important than getting every step right.”

I felt a quiet kind of warmth watching him answer the question so sincerely, because it was once again proof that he loved what he did.

Harlow asked more questions in this vein, and I appreciated the way she clearly knew the industry enough to actually talk about it.

She moved onto a more lighthearted segment where she gave the members arrows that they had to point at whichever member a question was most relevant for.

“Which member is most different on stage versus in real life?” she asked.

All the members, bar one, pointed their signs at Lee, who was known as the clown of the group, but was actually very reserved.

People who didn’t know him could write this off as him being an extrovert, but it was more to do with how self-conscious he was. He was more comfortable with being a part of the joke because he was so scared of being the butt of it. In the time I had known him, I’d only ever seen him relax around his members, where he allowed himself to fade into the background.

“Who takes the longest to respond to messages in the group chat?”

Everyone pointed at Jihoon, and I laughed because I knew first-hand how he always read those messages, but rarely bothered to respond immediately. It was oddly comforting to know something so small had remained the same.

Just before the group went on the small stage to perform a couple of songs from Reset, Harlow asked one last question.

“GVibes, you have a unique take on the music industry that most of us don’t. You’re performing mostly in Korean, you’re doing interviews in English, you’re travelling constantly, and yet the emotional connection is clearly translating. Why do you think this is?”

I expected Minjae to answer such a leading question, but he surprised me by saying, “Jihoon wrote many of the tracks from Reset. I’ll let him answer this one.”

Jihoon looked surprised, but nodded and picked up the mic.