LE SSERAFIM's Huh Yunjin doesn't really remember the moment she decided to pursue music as a career, but she doesn't fret about it. "I think it was just very natural," the 21-year-old tells Teen Vogue, calling in from morning Seoul with an "essential" iced americano in hand. "I got a lot of exposure to music performing as a kid, so I just had an affinity for it."
Music came into her life passively first — consuming "musicals, plays, and movies with music" — before she subconsciously started tapping into it more actively, enlisting the help of her younger sister. "We would just make songs together and get the camera," Yunjin recounts, the corner of her mouth immediately turning up. She’d sing, her sister would act. "We'd film music videos like that. Then as time went on, I just really liked storytelling, and I found that doing that through music, expressing myself through music, was very therapeutic. But also, I don't know, I just fell in love with it."
When you put it that simply, it almost feels like a fairytale. Girl discovers passion, girl pursues passion, passion turns into a career. Just a straight line guiding you to your final destination — but Yunjin's path has had a handful of deviations. Before debuting with LE SSERAFIM in 2022, the world first met Huh Yunjin in 2018 as a Pledis Entertainment trainee on Mnet's survival show Produce 48, where she competed alongside her now group members Kim Chaewon and Sakura. After the show ended without Yunjin’s debut, she felt disillusioned with idol life and moved back to the U.S. — she was born in Seoul but grew up in New York — to become a business major.
"When I went back to the U.S., I don't know, I went through every state of despair," she says in hindsight. "First, I was very much at peace. I was like, 'It's okay. It's fine.' And then, as time went [on], I was like, 'No, it's not fine. What am I going to do?' Then I was angry. Then I was so sad. Then I was upset. Then I felt guilty at times. Then I felt sorry again. And then, in the end, I got myself together, and I was like, 'I'm going to start a new life.'"
Then, Yunjin got the call asking her to return to South Korea to train and debut in a still-unnamed group. As she puts it, everything changed once more. "I went through it again. But in the end, I found my place."
Yunjin seems genuinely thankful for all the twists and turns that brought her here. She finally signed with Source Music in 2021 to join LE SSERAFIM. That part of her story post-2021 is chronicled on LE SSERAFIM's YouTube documentary The World Is My Oyster, but her experiences predating her debut are what largely inspired her new solo song, "blessing in disguise," which she first unveiled live during June's Weverse Con Festival.
"May I have your attention, please? This is the final boarding call for all passengers going from JFK to Incheon. All passengers should now be on board through gate 52," Yunjin's customer service voice announces after a smooth string section kicks off the song. A funky guitar line immediately takes over as the singer playfully recounts her leap of faith from New York to Seoul, inner turmoil included.
At times, the track feels like a soliloquy, an internal monologue where Yunjin reassures herself that everything will be alright. Elsewhere, it feels like a painfully cognizant conversation with a confidante.
"It feels like I'm just talking to a friend," Yunjin says, admitting that working on the track actually came with a fair amount of roadblocks, mostly internal, as she tried to figure out the message she wanted to send and grappled internally with imposter syndrome and the challenge of taking on a new sound. "It's disco funk, which is very out of my comfort zone, so I actually took months to write the song," she confesses amid laughs before clarifying that the actual writing process only took a couple of hours after landing on the message.
She keeps a log of ideas on a memo pinned on the notes app of her phone that she revisits from time to time. "I was like, well, what do I want to write about? So I thought of this again, and it was like, 'Oh, you know what? I'm just going to write it like I'm talking to someone. Just write it very naturally.' And then it just kind of rolled out because the whole song is very, I don't know, I guess, quirky. I don't know how to word it, but it's very free."
"Blessing in disguise" is a first for Yunjin, not only musically but also visually. Unlike her most recent solo releases, "I≠DOLL" and "love you twice," which incorporated Yunjin's own artwork into the music videos in the form of animations, "blessing in disguise" actually features footage captured by Yunjin herself, more akin to "Raise y_our glass" but stepped up a bit.
"I [was] kind of skeptical about it [since] it [was] my first time doing something like this," Yunjin shyly admits. "The director who always works with us for our LE SSERAFIM albums helped us out, and I'm filming a montage … showing you little snippets of my life." The final result is a candid collation straight from Yunjin's camera roll featuring multiple plane rides, solo late-night studio sessions, and plenty of memories shared with her LE SSERAFIM members — including from her first performance of “blessing in disguise.”
Whether it's with drawings, raw footage, or lyrics, an undeniable vulnerability permeates all of Yunjin's solo releases so far. Yet, she feels her most vulnerable song is yet to come, for now safely guarded in what she refers to as her vault, showing off her Swiftie tendencies. "I think if you look at [all of my released] songs together, there is some kind of story to it, but it does scare me to call it something," she says when asked about releasing more and turning it into her own collection. "I've written a lot about my past or my past thoughts, so everything up until now has been a reflection on my life. I'm scared that if I call it something, I'm going to have to move on to something else and then be like, 'Now I'm talking about my present and my future.'"
"I've always had a fear of the future," she continues. "I do always try to live in the present, but I think writing about the past is easy because everything has passed, and I can look at it from a very mature perspective. But if I write about right now, I feel like… I don't know; it's very raw and feels very vulnerable, I think, because this is me right now, and I'm facing myself as I am right now, so there's nothing I can do about it. I can't be like, 'Oh yeah, I was a little younger.' No, this is today."
One day, Yunjin hopes to muster the courage to be able to tackle the present, and perhaps even more ambitiously the future, without feeling as exposed as she does today, but until then, she is focusing on finding a blessing in disguise every day of her life. "Anything in life, I think you can see as a blessing in disguise," she explains. "If you look at it on a very grand scale, I guess the first time I didn't make it into an entertainment company, or I didn't make it as a trainee, then I was very much like, 'Oh, what am I going to do?' But in the end, I made it the third time, I think, or the second time. So that being the catalyst for this entire journey would be the second biggest blessing in disguise in my life."
On a smaller scale, it is as simple as LE SSERAFIM's maknae Hong Eunchae arriving with a stash of coffee and cakes to save the day. "Yesterday, Chaewon and I went live [on Weverse], but before we went live, there was a lot of time left. So it was like, 'Oh, what am I going to do?' Then at that time, Eunchae came with a load of Starbucks, so it was like, 'You know what? It actually worked out for the better. Now I can have some cheesecake and also go live.' It was very fun."
Even speaking about the mundane, Yunjin radiates positive energy, so much so that it’s only natural to wonder if she has an “off” button when she’s not at work. She doesn’t. "I feel like I'm very much the same off and on," she says. "All of my friends, when I meet my family, they're like, 'You're the same when you're off camera. How are you so similar?' I don't know."
Still, even if she's as natural when the cameras are rolling, there is a slight distinction between soloist Yunjin and LE SSERAFIM Yunjin. "If I'm very honest, when I am singing alone or when I'm doing stuff alone, I think it's very raw, and I'm very vulnerable," she says, her perpetual smile momentarily disappearing from her face. “Sometimes I feel naked. I'm like, 'Am I allowed to be this personal?' But I [still] try to be as down to earth and transparent. And then, with LE SSERAFIM Yunjin, I think I found myself a lot through our fans and receiving love and reassurance. I think the people who support and love us make us who we are. That person is also me, but it's my ideal version of me. It's the person that I really want to become. They're both me, but LE SSERAFIM Yunjin is the ultimate version that I aspire to be, or when I'm alone, it's a little more human. I do have a very introspective world inside.”
