Gaeul

IVE's eldest member, lead rapper and main dancer. She stayed a hidden trainee right up to debut, and she has a knack for turning a tiny part into the killing part.

Born Kim Gaeul on September 24, 2002 in Bupyeong, Incheon, she was named after the season she arrived in: gaeul is the native Korean word for autumn. She was president of her middle school dance club and once choreographed a routine that won her class the school pop-song contest. In 2017, as a ninth grader, she entered the qualifiers of an Incheon youth dance competition and got scouted by Starship Entertainment. She had no idea agency people were even watching until the offer came.

Her parents were against it at first. For the first year she commuted to the company alone, until it wore her down so much that her dad started picking her up every day from far away. The older and same-age trainees she leaned on left one by one, and she ended up among much younger kids, crying in secret. She stuck it out for about four and a half years, the longest of any member. She trained alongside An Yujin and Jang Wonyoung before Produce 48, but unlike them she never went on the survival show. When the two wrapped up IZ*ONE and IVE debuted in December 2021, she was the final member revealed, and the only adult in the lineup.

She shares rap duties with REI and holds down main dancer. Her style is all power, lines and detail, a neat contrast to Yujin's loose, natural groove. A clip of her whipping her hair around during the debut era went viral, and when she chopped it into a bob for LOVE DIVE she told sad fans short hair actually spins better, then proved it. Her part in that song was under ten seconds, but 'It's so bad, it's good' stuck anyway.

The real breakout was After LIKE. Her line, roughly 'don't keep asking me twice, three times, you know what my best quality is? I'm honest', became a meme and locked her name into the public's head. At concert encores she swaps 'my best quality' for things like 'being cute', 'winning first place', or at college festivals, the school's name, and fans love hunting for each version. Her parts grew through I AM and Kitsch, and after the world tour people noticed a steadier, richer low register. At the 2022 MAMA she joined other fourth-gen girl-group members for a cover of NMIXX's O.O, and a single one-second close-up was enough to blow up.

Her solo track Odd, debuted at the Seoul stop of IVE's second world tour, runs only about ninety seconds but fans compared it to a whole romance-fantasy novel. She co-wrote the lyrics around the idea that every beginning is imperfect yet beautiful, inspired by a paper plane wobbling through the air. Her pink hair from that era earned her the nicknames 'Persephone' and 'the saintess', and when she went back to black, fans promptly upgraded it to 'dark saintess'.

The name has lore too. Put her next to WJSN's Yeoreum (summer), 2NE1's Park Bom (spring) and aespa's WINTER, and you get all four seasons of K-pop girls. She also shares her name with a famous StarCraft pro gamer born in 1978, so Koreans joke you can guess someone's age by which Gaeul comes to mind first, a nod to the pro-gaming boom.

Inside the group she's the low-key 'old soul'. Five years older than maknae Leeseo, she felt the generation gap when Leeseo had never heard of Boys Over Flowers or Dream High, and she's quoted lines from Boys Over Flowers, which has a character literally named Chu Gaeul. A story that she once called Liz into the vocal room as a trainee spawned the 'vocal room of fear' meme; her defense is that she didn't want to talk in front of the other trainees. She's loved IU since elementary school and finally told her, on IU's own talk show, that she's her role model. Her motto: you're as unhappy as you are happy, and as happy as you are unhappy.