K-Pop Group UNIS’ Disbanding: There is a very specific kind of grief attached to the announcement of a music group ending or parting ways. It is a strange feeling because somewhere between the first song you replayed 50 times on a single day, the member whose fancams you started recognising, the inside jokes you picked up from the fandom, the edits that appeared on your explore page at 2 AM that you liked and reposted, and the friends you made because of the liking you had for the same people or group, the group stops being “just a group” and becomes a piece of your life itself.
Now, suddenly, when the group disbands, it feels like somebody removed a part of you from inside you where you wanted to be for longer. That is why K-pop group UNIS ending their group activities feels bigger than the technical language of “contract expiration”.
K-Pop Group UNIS’ Disbanding
On September 22, F&F Entertainment took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce that UNIS’ exclusive management contract would end on September 26, 2026, a little more than two years after their debut in March 2024.
Then, almost cruelly in the timing, they dropped Milky Way.
Released on September 23, Milky Way arrives just three days before the group’s activities officially conclude. Though painful for the fans, the lyrics of the song seem to be exactly what a farewell song should be like.
We Never “Just Listen” to Music
Though we pretend like fandom begins and ends with consumption, does it really?
You hear a song – like it – add it to your music platform’s “favourite section” – watch the MV – and perhaps even buy the album. But gone are those days when fandoms worked like that!
Music groups, especially contemporary pop groups, come with a little universe of their own: there are member personalities, lore, variety appearances, interviews, tours, streams, memes, fan art, edits, fan accounts, anniversaries, concert rituals, streaming parties and new terminologies that someone will be generous enough to explain patiently after you have mixed a comeback for a concert. K-pop has made the ecosystem visible.
The Group Becomes a Calendar
A group is often very simply woven into ordinary life: a comeback becomes something you wait for, a new hairstyle enters your friends’ group chat, your favourite music group’s track becomes the soundtrack to a particular semester or phase of your life, a member’s birthday becomes something you remember well even though you have never met them.
Suddenly, you are no longer remembering the song alone but yourself listening to it and its creators. That is one of the powers of fandom: music becomes a timestamp. There are songs that do not simply remind you of a person but of a version of you that existed when the song was all over, and it makes a group disbanding hit hard.
When a group disbands, you are not really mourning a personal relationship with eight strangers: you might be mourning the disappearance of a routine, a community, a particular corner of the internet, or even a particular version of yourself.
UNIS started with SBS’s Universe Ticket and debuted in March of 2024, and their contract was structured around a two-and-a-half-year period. In other words, the ending was built from the beginning, but the fandom happened anyway because knowing something had an expiry date does not stop you from feeling for it. In fact, it sometimes makes you hold it a little closer and tighter.
Parasocialism in K-pop
In contemporary times, we do not only see performers on a stage anymore: we have livestreams, casual selfies, behind-the-scenes videos, birthday messages, handwritten notes, and constant social media updates. The distance between the performer and the audience can feel smaller than it really is, and this is where “parasocialism” enters the chat.
Cambridge Dictionary defines “parasocial” as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc.” and perhaps that can be intense.
The attachment is sometimes not just about fans and artists but about fandoms too, having a stake, and sometimes the fandoms become the part that lasts.
Something About UNIS
There is something almost poignant about EverAfter having to process UNIS’ disbanding now. The fandom’s name itself has existed alongside the group since the formation and debut journey, and the announcement by F&F specifically thanked EverAfter for supporting the group since Universe Ticket, but now comes Milky Way.
Perhaps the song itself makes the ending of the group feel so emotional. The group can end as an industry entity, but the fandom does not necessarily end with it; the playlist remains, old performances, MVs, fan art remain. Someone will hear an old UNIS song sometime later and immediately remember being younger and listening to it when it actually dropped.
Perhaps We Were Never “Too Attached”
There is a tendency to look at intense fandom from the outside and question them caring “too much”, but the real question is perhaps what it gave them. A community, language, creative outlet, place to belong, soundtrack, reason to look forward to a particular date, a song that made an otherwise terrible day bearable and perhaps sometimes also something to obsess over when the whole world felt boring.
The point being made is not that fandom cannot be unhealthy; it can be, and boundaries, money, privacy, and real-life relationships do matter. An artist is still a stranger no matter how many livestreams one has watched, but the intense attachment is not directly meaningless just because the other person does not know you.
Eight people, two and a half years, many songs, and finally Milky Way that was UNIS for us!
Listen to UNIS’ Milky Way on YouTube.
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