In April, Hongjoong returned to Coachella with nothing to do.

Two years earlier, he had been on the Indio Valley stage when ATEEZ became the first K-pop boy band to perform at the festival. This time he was a guest, watching other people work. “That day I got so many inspirations,” he says of a trip where he linked up with Teddy Swims, PinkPantheress, Central Cee, Swae Lee and Daesung of BIGBANG. “I really love to experience everywhere.” He came back to Los Angeles, booked a session and crafted an atmospheric pop song that he specifies is “not just chill” but about a feeling he had been chasing his whole life.

That song arrives Friday (Sept. 18) as “ENOuGH,” a collaboration with Bazzi, that is unhurried, openly emotional and, perhaps most notably, sounds nothing like the group he leads in the midst of their biggest season yet.

On June 26, ATEEZ unleashed GOLDEN HOUR : Part.5 and made a headlining debut at London’s BST Hyde Park in the U.K. just two days later. The EP gave the group its third No. 1 on the Billboard 200, opening with a career-high 228,000 equivalent album units. At home in Korea, Part.5‘s lead single “BAD” climbed the local charts thanks in part to a viral dance, helping ATEEZ secure their first entry on the Billboard Global 200. Next month, a full day dedicated to ATEEZ and their fans at the inaugural 82WORLD: LA festival is already sold out.

But none of that superstardom is visible when Hongjoong joins an afternoon video call in August from a sun-filled Los Angeles hotel room. He’s dressed down in a plain white V-neck T-shirt with the collar cut off, a few silver rings stacked on different fingers, and a single fingernail painted black — a signature he rarely goes without to raise awareness for the Polished Man campaign, which aims to end violence against children. He looks less like the leader of one of K-pop’s hardest-working groups than someone enjoying a rare stretch of good weather with nowhere urgent to be. “We are so busy these days,” he says, “but finally I get to chill a little here.”

So, when the trending group of the moment’s leader turns up with a subtle song of his own, it’s important to note that it’s not a full-fledged solo departure. “If I give you a new solo debut, maybe I (will have) prepared more than one year,” he says. “But for this one, I made this song in April in L.A.” A proper solo debut would require far more than the few months it took to deliver “ENOuGH” — a song made on a break, at a moment when, for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sure what he was making.

“I just tried to make some chill song and also not just chill,” he says of those April studio days. “Before starting the music in L.A. in the session, before this song [became] ‘ENOuGH,’ I just focused on making good sounds because I think I need that in here. But for this song, I had a very specific message I wanted to write, and we talked about that before starting the session…I always walked with ATEEZ, and I’m really happy with that. At the same time, I’m 27 now, and I did eight years with ATEEZ. I made so many songs for ATEEZ and myself too, and now I think I have to get more experience because doing that will reflect to ATEEZ again and myself. So, that’s why I started this project and that’s why I think this song is very much ‘enough’ to start a collaboration project.”

Kim Hongjoong has spent almost a decade as ATEEZ’s leader, as well as a consistent songwriter and in-house producer for the act with nearly 200 songs officially registered under his name. In May, he made his debut as music director on the indie film Hallucination, which screened at the Jeonju International Film Festival; weeks later, he appeared on the K-POPS! soundtrack for a track alongside Anderson .Paak and Jay Park; and next month, he’ll make his solo festival debut via his first-ever live DJ set under the moniker NO1 at EDC Korea.

Still, by Hongjoong’s account, the year started confusingly.

“Last year, I really thought I knew myself very well because I know what I can do and where my good points and bad points are,” he shares. “But at the start of this year, I felt I was still learning about myself because if I make songs, sometimes I use high notes and sometimes I use low notes, but I thought that my high note is good because my vocal tone is very high and I think I’ll just use that when I make songs. But at the start of this year, when I listened to the songs that I made, I thought everything was not good. And also it makes me not ‘enough’ because — and I don’t know why — artists always change their flavor and music types.”

That reckoning and realization sent him looking for the gap between what he’s become good at as a musician and what made him want to be one in the first place.

“I thought I have to learn myself more with ATEEZ and also without ATEEZ too because I want to know about me, what I really like, and what I really don’t like,” he continues. “That’s why this music style is quite different than what I made before and ATEEZ’s style. I really love ATEEZ’s style, and I know I’m really good at doing a charismatic rap, but at the same time, the songs that I listened to when I was young were almost all emotional songs. So, that’s why I started this song with the kind of emotional chords, but also the very unique and comfortable sound.”

He’s not wrong about the charisma (listen to him declare himself the captain on “Say My Name,” the fire he spits on “This World” or last year’s solo cut “NO1”), but he’s also careful not to plant his personal flag in any one genre.

“In the near future, [my style] can change, so I want to try to collab with more artists,” he says. “Or if I release more songs, I think many things within a year will really change because I’m still learning myself. If I get my own style or learn my own style, I think there will be someday I can talk to you to say, ‘This is my style.’ I’m not sure this is my real style, but these days, at least in April, I felt this is one of my styles.”

Hongjoong’s opportunity to go find out came from something he hadn’t experienced in years: time off.

Late last year, he and his ATEEZ members sat down with management company, KQ Entertainment, and discussed setting two vacation periods in 2026. “We didn’t have any vacation before this year,” he shares. “When we confirmed to go on vacation, I immediately thought about how I could use that vacation for me and how I could use the vacation for loving myself and expressing myself at the same time.”

All eight ATEEZ members re-signed with KQ for another seven years in July 2025, with the second chapter leaving more space for individuality: Mingi released a six-track solo EP in May, Yunho has moved more into acting and others are taking on their own individual work, which Hongjoong frames as crucial maintenance for the group. “We put ATEEZ first,” he says. “But at the same time, everyone wants to plan their own things too. I think that’s very important to make ATEEZ last longer because everyone needs to express themselves and that makes synergy.”

In rediscovering his sparks, he first found a word with the song’s title coming before the track did.

“To be honest — well, everything is honest because I don’t wanna lie to you — but when I started to write this song, I wanted to sing about [a topic] I’ve never sung about before,” Hongjoong explains. “In my head, sometimes I felt not enough. But also, I think for my whole life I’ve been trying to find something that makes me enough, makes me feel enough. These days, after Coachella and after I got a little vacation, I thought about how something beside me, something nearby, already makes me enough. I didn’t think that was enough, but I realized it was actually a very easy task, to make me enough and I didn’t know before — and that’s why I wrote these lyrics.

“After I wrote the whole lyrics, I felt that many people will feel the same. These days, I think many people find that something can be lacking…” — here he pops out of English for one of the few times in the conversation, landing with his translator’s help on the word “deficiency” — “yeah, a deficiency within their lives, something lacking. And I always focused on that too before. But these days, I think and want to say to many audiences that we don’t have to fear the lacking or deficiency. If we focus on something that we already have, it makes me feel enough to me and can make you feel like you’re enough too.”

Despite its deeper meaning, the easy-listening vibe of “ENOuGH” sounds like a love song at first and Hongjoong doesn’t mind that. “That’s the whole message of this song, but at the same time, it looks very much like a love song too,” he says of a serenade that doubles as a note to oneself. “And that’s very right: I love my job and I love our fans. Also, I can love some girls too; I can love another person or people. I don’t wanna expose a very specific person or specific thing, but that’s why I started this song, and that’s the whole message of this song.”

Meanwhile, Bazzi was part of the song well before he was officially on the record: the Billboard Hot 100 hit “Mine” from 2017 and 2018’s “Beautiful” were fixtures for Hongjoong before he ever entered the industry. But a shared festival experience did the rest.

“We had good timing,” HJ recalls of ATEEZ playing BST Hyde Park Festival the same day Bazzi was on the lineup. “We met and we talked a little bit about our lives. When I was training, his songs were very big inspirations to me, so I talked about that too because ‘Mine’ and ‘Beautiful’ were songs I covered and I listened to a lot. So I talked with him a lot, we exchanged numbers, and after we went back home, I felt like this song was a very good fit for him. And I really love his COSMIC album and this song gave me that same energy. So, that’s why I asked him, ‘How about this song? We could make some kind of magic together.’ And he told me he 100% wanted to be in this song. So it happened very naturally and very fast. He recorded his part to me; we had some ping-pong about ad-libs and some chorus parts and very naturally made this song.”

Hongjoong’s quick, relentless work ethic means there’s more where that came from. “After I made this song, I actually have two, three more songs that I made,” he shares, “So, if I have a chance, I want to release these songs with the right timing.”

The day after chatting with Billboard, Hongjoong shot the “ENOuGH” music video in Los Angeles with a concept in his head long before he finished the song. “When I start music and film something, I have my whole vision,” he says. “Without a visual, I really can’t do anything, because my job is showing something to people.”

The concept has Hongjoong leaving Earth in a spaceship and traveling to a collaborator’s planets, with the first stop being Bazzi’s planet. “This whole story started from me,” he says. “Eight years with ATEEZ for me is a huge thing. I said I want more experiences, so for me, a huge experience is going to space. My huge role model is David Bowie. I love his music, but after my love of his music, space is one of my dream places. I’m scared that I can’t really go there in my reality, but I think I can make that visual in my music video. So, I want to travel space, but it’s just ‘my’ space, in my head. I don’t know when more collabs will come to me, but this is the start of the whole travel when I visit the Bazzi planet. Every planet will have a theme and Bazzi’s planet is time. Because in my fast life, I always felt that lack or deficiency, but after his planet, all of my emotions and thoughts are all ‘enough’ to me.”

For all the talk of learning to find contentment, Hongjoong has kept his and his band’s larger picture in mind instead of tracking day-to-day success.

“K-artists, and artists in general, always have ups and downs,” he shares. “I’m really happy with every achievement we’ve had, but I’m still preparing for the next step…we can go down someday, but I don’t want to make that huge gap to ATEEZ.” He also doesn’t want a year like 2026 or any of his future endeavors as an artist or group member to become what he calls “forgettable.”

That next step is written into the end of the “ENOuGH” video. After Hongjoong sings with Bazzi on the new planet, the lights on his spaceship start flashing, calling him back, and the viewer sees Hongjoong take one last look at the planet before he’s aboard again, journeying to whatever experience and lesson the next planet has for him.

Asked what Planet Hongjoong looks like, he doesn’t need to invent one — he’s already found his home complete with seven other inhabitants.

“My planet is Earth, actually,” he says with a big smile. “My planet is ATEEZ, from now and forever, so my home is ATEEZ, so I can’t move to another planet. I just go there and then I come back.”