Byun Baek Hyun | 변백현 | About

Byun Baek Hyun started training to sing at eleven, having decided he wanted to be Rain. He fronted a band called Honsusangtae — the word means coma — at Jungwon High School in Bucheon, won a local music festival with them, took piano lessons from DickPunks' Kim Hyun Woo, and holds a black belt in hapkido. An SM Entertainment scout stopped him in the street while he was preparing for the Seoul Institute of the Arts entrance exam; he joined in 2011 and had the shortest training of anyone in EXO, being unveiled as a member in early 2012.

He sang before he acted. "Beautiful", written for EXO's own web drama "EXO Next Door" in April 2015, was the first soundtrack single from a web drama to top the digital charts. His duet with Suzy, "Dream" (2016), went straight to number one on the weekly Gaon chart and won five music shows; "Rain", with Soyou the following year, took an all-kill across every Korean chart, making him the first SM artist to manage one in consecutive years. He played Don Lockwood in the Korean production of "Singin' in the Rain" in 2014, and made his acting debut proper in 2016 as Wang Eun, the tenth prince, in "Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo", which brought him a New Star Award at the SBS Drama Awards.

His solo records sell in quantities that are hard to take in. "City Lights" (2019) moved 508,321 copies in its first month, the highest monthly figure any solo artist had recorded on the Gaon chart, and remains the best-selling album by a Korean solo artist of the 2010s. "Delight" (2020) took 732,297 pre-orders, topped iTunes in sixty-eight countries and passed a million copies; "Bambi" (2021) took 833,392. He won Best Male Artist at the Mnet Asian Music Awards three years running from 2019, and leads SuperM.

He sang the national anthem at the opening of the 132nd IOC session in February 2018, served from May 2021, and in June 2023 ended his SM contract along with Xiumin and Chen over unpaid fees and terms they considered unreasonable. The three of them have worked through his own label, INB100, since January 2024, while EXO itself stays with SM.